Justa Fidelity Sentre, who prefers to be called Nana Akua, joined our lab in the Spring of 2023. Nana Akua received her MS degree from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana. Prior to joining our program, Nana Akua worked in forensic chemistry. Her PhD studies will focus on the chemical ligation of RNA oligonucleotides.

The Royzen research group was awarded an ‘Opportunity Grant’ from the Jackson Laboratories, titled: Synthesis of RNA oligonucleotides by chemical ligation. Our goal will be to develop a chemical alternative to ‘splint ligation’ towards construction of RNA oligonucleotides containing site-specifically incorporated modifications.

Congratulations to Alyssa Hoy who successfully defended her PhD dissertation, titled: Synthesis of oligonucleotides containing unnatural backbone and regulation of CRISPR activity using IEDDA chemistry. Aly’s most recent work, describing CRISPR experiments that utilize guide RNAs containing nucleobase modifications has been published in CRISPR Journal.

Congratulations to Amir Agharezaee who submitted his MS dissertation, titled: Fluorescent labeling of ribosomal RNA in live mammalian cells. After graduating fom the University at Albany, Amir is planning to pursue a career in analytical chemistry in the United States. Amir is the second MS student to graduate from our lab.

Royzen Lab has recently been in the news that highlight our collaboration with a San Francisco start-up Shasqi, Inc. Our collaboration resulted in a development of a Click Activated Protodrugs Against Cancer (CAPAC) platform, which is currently being evaluated in Phase I clinical trials for the treatment of advanced solid tumors.

Discover Magazine article

The Royzen research group was awarded an R21 grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). The title of the grant is: Chemical synthesis and non-chromatographic purification of long RNA oligonucleotides containing naturally occurring modifications. Our collaborators, Dr. Jia Sheng and Dr. Gaby Fuchs are co-investigators on this award.

Royzen Lab has recently been in the news that highlight our collaboration with a San Francisco start-up Shasqi, Inc. Our collaboration resulted in a development of a Click Activated Protodrugs Against Cancer (CAPAC) platform, which is currently being evaluated in Phase I clinical trials for the treatment of advanced solid tumors.

C&E News Article

UAlbany Article

UC Davis Article

Congratulations to Muhan He who successfully defended her PhD dissertation, titled: Development of chemical methods for oligonucleotide purification, paramagnetic labeling and synthesis of DNA-based advanced materials. Muhan’s most recent work, describing non-chromatographic purification of synthetic RNA has been uploaded to bioRxiv.

Our collaborative work with Shasqi, Inc. resulted in two publications which have been uploaded to bioRxiv and ChemRxiv. These manuscripts are currently undergoing peer review. These papers were recently discussed in a Science Translational Medicine Blog.

bioRxiv manuscript

ChemRxiv manuscript

Our collaborative work with Lei Zhu Lab (FSU) was just accepted for publication in Bioconjugate Chemistry. Our publication describes in-cell labeling of proteins of interest using two orthogonal bio-orthogonal chemistries. Congratulations to everyone who contributed to this work.

Our collaborative work with Yigit Lab was just accepted for publication in ChemMedChem. The paper describes spectroscopic analysis of in-cell activation of doxorubicin. This work is supported by our collaborative R15 grant from NIGMS.

Our long awaited book chapter, titled: “In vivo bioconjugation using bio-orthogonal chemistry” has been published by Wiley. We would like to thank all the contributors.

Max Royzen has been promoted to Associate Professor! Thank you to all the colleagues, administrators, and group members past and present, who contributed to Prof. Royzen’s promotion.

After numerous updates and revisions, we finally published a Chem Comm paper describing imaging of ribosomal RNA in live mammalian cells. This work was started by Papa Nii six years ago, continued by Irfan and finished by Muhan And Kui. Congratulations to all the co-authors!

We welcome a new graduate student, Amir Agharezaee, who just joined the Royzen research group with a background in biochemistry. He’ll be working on RNA imaging in live cells.

Our collaborative work with Shasqi, Inc., as well as collaborators from Berlin has just been accepted for publication by ACS Central Science. Congratulations to Eddie, Chris, Hasina, Ilenis and Dr. Khan!

We received another collaborative SBIR grant with Shasqi, Inc. We would like to thank the NIGMS institute of the NIH for their generous support. This will be a 3-year grant focused on the development of bio-orthogonal chemistry-based drug delivery strategies.

We welcome the new postdoctoral scientist, Xunshen Wu, who just joined the Royzen research group from China. Dr. Wu completed his doctoral work past summer at the East China University of Science and Technology.