ESR 5 – Patricia Perez Schmidt

ESR project: Glycan-coated nanoparticles for the enhanced delivery of bioactive compounds

Supervisor: Dr Laura Polito

Institution: CNR SCITEC, IT

Country of origin: Spain

NanoCarb Research: Patricia will develop synthetic methods for the rapid and flexible synthesis of saccharide-coated gold nanoparticles (GNP) by utilising high-yielding coupling methods such as “click” chemistry on gold-NP. She will prepare a multivalent platform based on gold nanoparticles to which different glycostructures and other chemical entities such as immunopeptides and drugs can be coupled. She will also explore analytical methods to characterize the GNPs and assess stability in vitro and ex-vivo and to show the performance of these particles in suitable in vivo experiments.

Scientific Background: Patricia holds a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from Universidad of Granada (Spain). After graduating she moved to Denmark to pursue an MSc in Chemistry specialised in organic chemistry at the University of Copenhagen. During her master thesis ‘Peptides for the potential treatment of neurodegenerative diseases’, supervised by Prof. Knud J. Jensen, she focused on the synthesis, purification and analysis of modified peptides.