Chemistry Seminar with Dr. Nikki Thiele from Oak Ridge National Laboratory
“Taming Exotic Elements for Medicine: The Coordination Chemistry Behind Radiopharmaceuticals”
With recent advances in isotope production, the routine isolation of an array of new and exotic diagnostic and therapeutic radionuclides is becoming feasible. These emerging radionuclides possess diverse radiochemical and radiobiological properties suitable for imaging and treating a range of cancer types, introducing the possibility of creating targeted radiopharmaceutical agents customized to each patient’s disease via judicious choice of radionuclide in conjunction with biological targeting vector. A key bottleneck in the advancement of these radionuclides into the clinic, however, resides in the lack of suitable bifunctional chelating agents that can rapidly bind these radionuclides and stably retain them to targeting vectors in vivo. In this presentation, we will discuss our efforts at ORNL to develop chelation platforms to support the clinical implementation of a selection of emerging alpha-, beta-, and Auger-therapy radionuclides
Speaker bio: Nikki Thiele earned her Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences (Medicinal Chemistry) at the University of Florida under the guidance of Prof. Kenneth B. Sloan, where her research focused on developing prodrugs of iron chelators and other small molecules to improve their pharmacokinetic profiles. From there, she joined the bioinorganic research group of Prof. Justin J. Wilson at Cornell University, where she worked as a postdoctoral associate to develop expanded macrocyclic chelators for applications in targeted radionuclide therapy, industrial descaling, and separations of rare earth elements. In 2020, she accepted a research staff position in the Chemical Separations Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a strategic hire. Her research is highly interdisciplinary in nature, leveraging aspects of synthetic organic chemistry, coordination chemistry, analytical methodology, and radiochemistry.
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