Given that the pandemic started in 2020 causing research to slow more than ever before, it isn’t surprising that our lab did not have any publications with 2021 dates. However, I’m very impressed how my students have managed to prioritize research in the more recent year. We had a wonderful summer 2021 and already have one 2022 publication stemmed from that work.

Our remarkable computational collaborator, Prof. Carol Parish, approached me in spring 2021 to see if we would be interested testing some compounds against the Covid-19 main protease. Because of the push to find treatments, there were a number of biochemical assay kits available so I jumped on the idea to expand our lab knowledge. Cathy Bayas was happy to add to the project. So here’s the paper published in European Journal of Medicinal Chemistry Reports. You’ll notice it is a nice collaboration between synthetic chemists, biochemists, and computational chemists. Justin Airas, the lead author, was the main driver of the project and really pushed to understand the computational work.