Peter Swaan , PhD

Oral bioavailability remains a crucial problem for the majority of pharmacologically active compounds under development. During the past decade it was observed that a vast amount of drugs share intestinal absorption pathways with those for nutrients. Currently, several of these transport routes (e.g. bile acid and peptide carrier systems) are under investigation for their potential utilization in drug delivery. As a result, our knowledge about substrate specificity and structure-transport relationships has significantly increased. Nevertheless, our understanding at the molecular level of these transport mechanisms is limited, making it difficult to predict recognition of a (new) drug by carrier-mediated mechanisms a priori. Since most transporters are membrane-bound proteins, isolating and resolving their three-dimensional structure has proven to be difficult. We are interested in utilizing these transporters and to develop techniques to study the interaction of substrates with the carrier proteins at the molecular level. This consists of traditional biochemical and kinetic characterization of the carrier proteins as well as molecular biology and molecular modeling techniques.