Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science structural biologist Min Lu, PhD, was recently awarded a four-year, $1.3 million grant from the National Institutes of General Medical Sciences to investigate new therapeutic life science strategies to combat multidrug resistance (MDR). MDR poses a major challenge to the development of new drug therapies for cancer and infectious diseases. It can reduce the effectiveness of drugs and result in adverse effects and increased chance of death. MDR has also been identified in other classes of drugs, including those for neurological disorders. Dr. Lu’s study, “Molecular Basis of Substrate Translocation in the Drug/H+ Antiporter 1 (DHA1) Family,” will serve as a stepping stone to the development of new ways to inhibit multidrug transporters — a type of protein inside the cell membrane that moves specific molecules from the inside to the outside of a cell.
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