18^th Annual Pharmaceutical And Chemical Analysis Congress

Biography

Dr. Schöneich is the Takeru Higuchi Professor for Bioanalytical Chemistry and Chair of the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at The University of Kansas. He received his Diploma in Chemistry from the Free University Berlin, Germany, in 1987. Between 1987 and 1991 he worked in the Department of Radiation Chemistry at the Hahn-Meitner Institute for Nuclear Research in Berlin, Germany. He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1990 from the Technical University Berlin, Germany. He joined the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at The University of Kansas as a post-doctoral fellow in 1991, and as a faculty member in 1992; in 2004, he was a Visiting Professor at the ETH Zürich, Switzerland.

Research Interest

Professor Schöneich's research focusses on oxidative post-translational modifications of proteins in vitro and in vivo, and the consequences of such modifications for the development of protein therapeutics and biological systems. Oxidative post-translational modifications are generally carried out by reactive oxygen species and/or reactive nitrogen species. In vivo, such oxidative modifications accompany physiological disorders associated with biological aging or disease. Importantly, only selected proteins suffer oxidative modifications in vivo, which may be the result of chemical selectivity, protein structure, the rates of protein turnover, and/or specific protein-protein interactions. In vitro, i.e. in pharmaceutical formulations, protein oxidation presents an important stability problem. We are interested to generate a database which relates oxidation sensitivity to specific structural elements of proteins. With such a database at hand, we can potentially predict the stability of new protein products, facilitating pharmaceutical development. To achieve such a database, we are studying oxidative protein stability for proteins in (a) solution, (b) in polymeric matrices, and (c) in the solid state.