Developed skills and lines of research

Sandra Gemma is Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Siena. She graduated in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Technology from the University of Siena in 1998, where she also obtained her PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences in 2003.

She completed postdoctoral research at the Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois at Chicago, under the guidance of Prof. Arun K. Ghosh.

Her research focuses on developing potential antitumor and anti-infective drugs. Specifically, her work involves the design and synthesis of compounds targeting various pharmacological agents, such as enzymes (proteases and polymerases), hydrolases, and soluble or membrane-bound receptors. She employs diverse strategies, including the synthesis and modification of natural compounds, structure-based drug design, and the development of synthetic methodologies for preparing compound libraries to study structure-activity relationships.

Her research outputs include more than 156 international publications (H-index: 39), four international patents, and a book co-authored with Prof. Arun K. Ghosh, published by Wiley-VCH, titled Structure-based Design of Drugs and Other Bioactive Molecules: Tools and Strategies.

Projects funded by FFC Ricerca as Principal Investigator or as Research Manager

FFC#7/2024
Targeting quorum sensing to fight Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections

FFC#16/2015
Development of metallo-enzyme inhibitors to overcome P. aeruginosa antibiotic-resistance in cystic fibrosis patients

Publications from FFC Research projects

Brindisi M, Brogi S, Giovani S et al. Targeting clinically-relevant metallo-β-lactamases: from high-throughput docking to broad-spectrum inhibitors. J Enzyme Inhib Med Chem, 2016;31(sup1):98-109. Epub 2016 Apr 28