Larissa M. Podust
Drug Discovery for Neglected Tropical Diseases
• Moved to the Skaggs School of
Pharmacy from UCSF in December 2014
• Center for Discovery and Innovation in
Parasitic Diseases (CDIPD) directed by
James McKerrow
• CDIPD Structural Biology and X-ray
Crystallography Core
Core Expertise
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Protein Chemistry
Enzymology
Structural Biology
X-ray Crystallography
Structure-based Drug Discovery
Proposed Collaborations with SSPPS Faculty
• Continue as CDIPD Structural Biology/X-ray Crystallography Core
(collaboration with the Research Faculties and Project Scientists: Jair Lage
(Kinetoplastids) and Anjan Debnath (Amoebas)
• Collaboration with Tracy Handel on setting and maintaining Crystal Lab
equipped with the shared state of the art instruments – Mosquito (LCP),
Dragonfly and the UV Imager – for the service-based and collaborative
research
• Implement computation into structure-based drug-discovery project on
Chagas Disease in collaboration with Ruben Abagyan
• Three-way collaboration on phosphodiesterase 4 (PDE4)-related project is
discussed with Susan Taylor and the new coming Faculty, Conor Caffey