MDPI and Marine Drugs joined forces with the International Summer School on Natural Products (ISSNP) to organise a series of three webinars entitled “Viruses, not only the bad ones | An Approach on Viruses by the International Summer School on Natural Products (ISSNO) 2020”.

The main focus of the International Summer School on Natural Products (ISSNP) is on both established and emerging areas of research at the cutting-edge of organic chemistry inspired by natural products.

Chaired by Prof. Dr. Valeria Costantino, Prof. Dr. Giorgia Oliviero, Dr. Mattia Mori and Prof. Dr. Daniele Passarella, each webinar sees one speaker present and discuss their research. Prof. Dr. Orazia Taglialatela-Scafati, Editor-in-Chief of Marine Drugs introduced the webinar’s speaker: Prof. Dr. Vincenzo Cerullo from the University of Helsinki, Sweden. Prof. Dr. Cerullo gave a talk entitled “Dressing Viruses in Tumor’s Clothing: Cloning-Free Platforms to Trigger Tumor-Specific Immune Response”.

The details of experts:

Prof. Dr. Vincenzo Cerullo is a professor of biological drug development and Head of the Drug Research Program, HiLIFE fellow, and co-leader of the Immunotherapy at Digital Precision Cancer Medicine Flagship (iCAN) at University of Helsinki. He is the scientific founder of VALO therapeutics. He has received several awards and raised more than 6 million EUR in research grants in the last five years, published more than 90 publications and 30 patents, he has been ranked by expertscape as N7 worldwide, N4 in Europe, and N1 in Finland in the field of oncolytic virotherapy.

Prof. Dr. Valeria Costantino has been an associate professor of organic chemistry since 2004 with the Department of Pharmacy of UniNA. Her research group focuses on exploring the unique biodiversity of natural products from marine sponges and cyanobacteria as lead compounds for biotechnological applications. More recently, her group has applied their chemical knowledge to explore quorum sensing and the quorum quenching system in bacteria symbiotic with sponges with the goal to design novel leads in antibacterial drug discovery. 

Prof. Dr. Oliviero Giorgia has been an associate professor of organic chemistry since 2016 with the Department of Molecular Medicine and Medical Biotechnologies. Currently, Prof. Dr. Oliviero’s research activity is mainly focused on the synthesis of quadruplex-forming oligonucleotides and peptide nucleic acids to be used as new drugs or as innovative diagnostic tools. Prof. Dr. Oliviero has recently achieved promising results in the direct synthesis of oligonucleotide strands (BIOSENSOR) on porous silica supports (PSi). 

Prof. Dr. Daniele Passarella is an associate professor of organic chemistry at the Università di Milano. His research activity focuses on the organic synthesis of active compounds with particular interest in natural products with the aim of interfering with the biology of cancer and neurodegeneration. 

Dr. Mattia Mori is senior researcher in medicinal chemistry at the University of Siena (Italy) and has a Ph.D. in structural biology. His research focuses on the computational design and optimization of small molecules of pharmacological relevance, mostly starting from natural products, and in computational studies on macromolecules’ motions.