Professor Daniel Harki

The Harki laboratory works across the chemistry-biology interface to design and develop novel, biologically active small molecules. There are three major projects in the laboratory that involve the development of:

• Small molecule and nucleic acid inhibitors of APOBEC3 DNA cytosine-to-uracil deaminases
• Heterobifunctional degrading molecules (also called proteolysis targeting chimeras or PROTACs) to degrade difficult-to-target proteins in human disease
• Orally bioavailable small molecule therapeutics for viruses of pandemic concern

For each of these projects, which are all focused on developing therapeutics for human diseases, protein-ligand computational docking experiments are critically important to help design the molecules that the researchers synthesize and test biologically.