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Two grants totaling $120,000 have been awarded by the National Institutes of Health to Peter Y. Johnson, an organic chemist and assistant professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins. One grant was awarded by the National Cancer Institute and the other by the Infectious Disease Section of NIH. The funds will support research projects that have shown promise in developing anticancer drugs and new antibiotics. The two projects evolved out of earlier research on the syntheses of penicillin-like materials. The objective of that work, Dr. Johnson explains, was to produce molecules that "look" enough like penicillin to be carried through the body and act in the same manner as real penicillin, but that are slightly different in molecular structure. This slight difference is intended to "fool" bacteria, many strains of which, over the years, have developed strong defense mechanisms against natural penicillin, rendering it ineffective as an antibiotic. "Our research is still at a basic level," Dr. Johnson says, "and at this point we are simply adding to a base knowledge that hopefully will lead to the development of new drugs for doctors to test. But it is the nature of basic research that one can never be certain where the payoff will come, or if there will be a payoff at all. In this case, however, while developing new antibacterial molecules, we discovered a series of molecules that were shown to be active against lymphocytic leukemia, a form of cancer. The new funding from the Institutes will support further work in both the antibiotic and anticancer areas for a period of three years and will enable Dr. Johnson to support three postdoctoral students in the Department of Chemistry as assistants in the projects. The focus of the research in the cancer area now, he says, will be to learn more about the structures of these molecules and to try to identify the functional groups or parts that are responsible for the anticancer activity. "If we can pick out these pieces," he explains, "we might be able to put them together in such a way as to increase their effectiveness. Dr. Johnson, 32, is a graduate of the University of Illinois and the holder of a Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been a member of the Johns Hopkins faculty since 1970. |
