Deepanjan received his bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from University of Calcutta in 2010 and completed his Master’s study in Chemistry in 2012 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India. He then joined the group of Prof. Jyotirmayee Dash at Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS), Kolkata, India to pursue his PhD study in Bio-organic Chemistry. During his PhD, Deepanjan worked on the development of target guided synthetic approaches for the discovery of selective small molecules for nucleic acid targets. After completing the PhD, he moved to USA, where he worked on the design and synthesis of fluorescent ligands for in vitro selection of RNA aptamers in the Biological Chemistry department of University of Minnesota. In 2020, he joined the group of Prof. Ashraf Brik, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. His research in Brik’s group was focused on the selective macrocyclization of peptides as modulators of ubiquitin chains & development of PROTAC degraders for the treatment of Therapy Resistant Cancers. In January 2023, he moved to the UK and joined the group of Professor Jason Micklefield at the University of Manchester, UK as a postdoctoral research associate, where he focused on the synthesis of polyene amide derivatives for developing of antifungal agents. Deepanjan was awarded with Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions postdoctoral fellowship in 2023 call to continue his postdoctoral research in Micklefield group, where he will contribute his expertise in bioorganic chemistry/chemical biology, solid phase synthesis and nucleic acid chemistry to the development of enzymatic methods for the assembly of modified nucleic acid therapeutics.
Selected Publications:
- R. Vanjari, D. Panda, S. Mandal, G. B. Vamisetti and A. Brik, Gold(I)-Mediated Rapid Cyclization of Propargylated Peptides via Imine Formation, J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2022, 144, 4966.
- P. Saha, D. Panda, D. Müller, A. Maity, H. Schwalbe and J. Dash, In situ Formation of Transcriptional Modulators by Non-canonical DNA i-Motifs, Chem. Sci., 2020, 11, 2058.
- D. Panda, P. Saha, T. Das and J. Dash, Target Guided Synthesis Using DNA Nanotemplates for Selectively Assembling a G-quadruplex Binding c-MYC Inhibitor, Nat. Commun., 2017, 8, 16103.
- M. Debnath, S. Ghosh, D. Panda, I. Bessi, H. Schwalbe, K. Bhattacharyya and J. Dash, Small Molecule Regulated Dynamic Structural Changes of Human G-quadruplexes, Chem. Sci., 2016, 7, 3279.