Vadim Nazarenko
1984-1989
Simferopol State University, Crimea,
Ukraine
1989-1991
Dnipropetrovsk State University, Ukraine
1997-2003
University of Louisville
2003-2004
Microbac Inc., Louisville
2004-now
Research associate, University of Louisville
(Bleomycin, Computational Studies)
Structural Model of Bleomycin intercalated into the minor groove of DNA
Bleomycin is a general name for a group of cytotoxic antineoplastic antibiotics that naturally are produced by Streptomyces verticulus bacteria and which were discovered by Umezawa group (Japan) in 1964.
Bleomycin is employed as antitumor medication in the treatment of several types of cancers such as squamous cell carcinomas, non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas, testicular carcinomas, and ovarian cancer. There are two major forms of bleomycin that are part of the administered medication – bleomycin sulfate: bleomycin A2 and bleomycin B2.
One of the chemical properties that bleomycin possesses and that makes it attractive to use as an antitumor agent is that bleomycin can cleave one or two strands of DNA in the DNA-sequence specific way. Generally DNA scissions occur at 5´-GC and 5´GT sequences by the abstraction of C4´ -H at pyrimidine nucleotides.
Over the last forty years there was a great amount of research conducted to understand bleomycin’s structure and the mechanism of its interaction with DNA in order to come up with more efficient design.
In our research of bleomycin we are using means of computational quantum chemistry to better understand electronic structure of bleomycin and it’s modes of interaction with DNA.