Institute of Organic and Analytical Chemistry (ICOA)

The main objective of the laboratory’s research activities is finding and developing novel bioactive molecules having potential applications as drugs, PET imaging agents, probes for in vivo imaging, or as components of cosmetics formulation. The scientific approach to these new molecules involves design by molecular modelling techniques, preparation by organic synthesis, with a particular emphasis on heterocyclic compounds, carbohydrate derivatives and nucleoside analogs, extraction from plant material using high performance separation techniques and mass spectrometry analysis, and by enzymology, in order to identify and characterize the receptors of certain bioactive molecules.

Research topics

•    Chemoinformatics, modeling, IA
•    Glycomolecules: from synthesis to enzymology
•    Heterocyclic synthesis and medicinal chemistry
•    Modified Nucleosides
•    Extraction, analysis of bioactive molecules
•    Chemical biology probes (PROTAC, fluorescence and covalent probes, metabolites)
•    Imaging agents design (Near IR, IRM, TEP, ...)

Equipment and technology

•    400 and 500 MHz NMR spectrometers
•    Orbitrap Ascend Tribrid HRMS mass spectrometer
•    Q-Tof maXis HRMS mass spectrometer
•    MALDI-TOF mass spectrometer
•    Simple and Triple quadrupole MS mass spectrometers
•    Separation techniques: UHPLC, SFC, GC, CE, HPTLC, CPC
•    CPU computing cluster of 156 cores of calculation (6 nodes with 12 cores + 3 nodes with 28 cores)
•    GPU computing cluster of 32 GeForce RTX 2080 and 2 GeForce RTX 3090 cards
•    Flow chemistry (Uniqsis, Corning)
•    Glass blowing workshop