• Biologics
• Combinatorial libraries
• Drug discovery
• Molecular recognition
• Peptidomimetics
• HTPS
• Unnatural amino acids
• Thrombin inhibitors
• Proteases
• Arginine methylation

Title: Assistant Professor & Canada Research Chair in Drug Discovery

Email: afrankel@interchange.ubc.ca

Telephone: 604-822-7146

Fax: 604-822-3035

Links: www.frankellaboratory.com/

Degrees:

 

Research Focus:

The Frankel Laboratory is developing a technology to create large combinatorial libraries of peptidomimetic compounds for screening against therapeutic targets. These libraries are generated from the ribosome-mediated polymerization of a set of unnatural amino acids with desired functionality (e.g., protease resistance). This emerging technology will serve as a reliable platform for future drug discovery.

Current Projects:

Project 1 – Designing a Reconstituted Translation System. The goal of this project is to design a reconstituted translation system that can efficiently polymerize N-methyl and cyclic amino acids in an mRNA display format. Project 2 – Targeting the Serine Protease Thrombin. The goal of this project is to target the serine protease thrombin with an mRNA display library containing one or more N-methyl and cyclic amino acids for the purpose of identifying ligands that are resistant to enzymatic degradation as a prototype for broad drug lead discovery. Project 3 – Building Unnatural Amino Acids into the Translation Apparatus. The goal of this project is to expand the chemical repertoire used in protein synthesis at one of the functionally important steps in translation, Elongation Factor-Tu recognition of aminoacyl-tRNAs.

Selected Publications:

Frankel, A., S.W. Millward and R.W. Roberts. 2003. Encodamers: Unnatural Peptide Oligomers Encoded in RNA. Chemistry and Biology, 10:1043-1050. Xia, T., A. Frankel, J. Ren, T.T. Takahashi, and R.W. Roberts. 2003. The conformation of the nascent boxB mRNA/N protein complex dictates the function of the phage antitermination switch. Nature Structural Biology, 10:812-819. Frankel, A., S. Li, S.R. Starck, and R.W. Roberts. 2003. Unnatural RNA display libraries. Current Opinion in Structural Biology, 13:506-512. Frankel, A. and R.W. Roberts. 2003. In Vitro Selection for Sense Codon Suppression. RNA, 9:780-786. Frankel, A., N. Yadav, J. Lee, S. Clarke, T.L. Branscombe, and M.T. Bedford. 2002. The Novel Human Protein Arginine N-Methyltransferase PRMT6 Is a Nuclear Enzyme Displaying Unique Substrate Specificity. Journal of Biological Chemistry, 277:3537-3543.