More information about Hans van den Elst

Hans works as a technician in the group of prof. Van Boom since 1983. His job was to synthesize DNA-fragments in solution and after three years he started to make them on solid support with the so called Gene Assembler. After synthesis the fragments were analyzed and purified with FPLC (Fast Protein Liquid Chromatography) and HPLC (High Pressure Liquid Chromatography). From that moment his interest in equipment started to grow.
He synthesized, analyzed and purified bioorganic molecules like modified DNA- and RNA-fragments, teichoic acids, nucleopeptides and special peptides together with a lot of Ph.D. students and in collaboration with other institutes.
In September 1997 his job changed to the challenge of the Combinatorial Chemistry, because of the opportunity to get the LaMOSS robot system. LaMOSS stands for Labotec Modular Organic Synthesizer System. This robot system can manage automatically 48 reactions on solid support or in solution and can even make mixtures of the reaction products. In this way libraries of bioorganic molecules can be made. In combination with high throughput screening, these large numbers of pharmaceutical interesting compounds will be used for drug discovery.
Hans programmed and managed the LaMOSS robot system to a flexible powerful synthesizer. With this robot system he synthesized compounds like Pt-ligands (project with the group of professor Jan Reedijk), peptide analogues (project with dr. B.E.A. Burm and Gaubius Instituut, TNO (dr. L. Cohen)), simultaneously 13 long peptides for professor E. Wimmer, State University of New York, cyclic sugar amino acid peptides (project RGD with Herman Overkleeft and Renate van Well) and a combinatorial library of sugar acid-peptides as potential fucosyltransferase inhibitors (project with dr. D.V. Filippov and Organon NV).
After synthesis of these (mixtures of) compounds, they have to be analyzed, identified and sometimes even purified. The latter has stimulated Hans to broaden his knowledge on analytical techniques.

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