Mauri Kostiainen
Novel Dendritic Structures for Gene Therapy

Project Overview

In this project, Mauri (Erasmus Student – Helsinki) developed our research in an overtly biological direction. He developed some dendritic systems capable of binding very strongly to DNA. As well as carrying out some challenging organic synthesis, Mauri developed expertise in a range of different techniques to characterise the DNA binding event – including fluorescence, circular dichroism, transmission electron microscopy and even some cell based assays. In the future, these systems will be developed further, as they have potential medicinal applications as non-viral delivery agents for use in gene therapy. The results of Mauri's exciting project are being published in Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.