The University of Houston College of Pharmacy welcomes Sreekanth Vedagopuram, Ph.D., as an assistant professor of medicinal chemistry in the Department of Pharmacological and Pharmaceutical Sciences.
Vedagopuram earned a bachelor’s degree in pharmacy from Kaktiya University in India, a master's degree in medicinal chemistry from the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research in India, and a Ph.D. in biotechnology at UNESCO-Regional Centre for Biotechnology in India.
Before joining UH, Vedagopuram served as a research scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., where he previously served as a visiting postdoctoral research fellow with concurrent appointments at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Institutes of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Vedagopuram’s research combines medicinal chemistry, chemical biology and genetic engineering to develop new therapeutic strategies. His work has included the development of high-throughput screening approaches to identify small-molecule drugs and degraders, as well as technologies designed to improve the delivery and precision of genome-editing systems.
At the Broad Institute, Vedagopuram designed and implemented a high-throughput, high-content imaging screen to identify small-molecule drugs capable of regenerating pancreatic beta cells using stem-cell-derived three-dimensional organoids. He also developed cell-specific targeting technologies for genome editors and cell-based immunotherapies and worked on the evolution of miniature CRISPR proteins and chemogenetic tags.
Vedagopuram’s doctoral research at the UNESCO-Regional Centre for Biotechnology focused on lipid-anticancer drug conjugates for cancer therapy. His work included the synthesis and evaluation of phospholipids and lipid-drug conjugates and studies demonstrating antitumor efficacy and safety in animal models.
Vedagopuram has authored or coauthored 34 publications in such peer-reviewed journals as ACS Central Science, Angewandte Chemie International Edition, Biomaterials Science, Bioconjugate Chemistry, Molecular Pharmaceutics and The Journal of Physical Chemistry B.
He also is co-inventor on more than a dozen multiple U.S. and international patents related to drug discovery, genome editing and therapeutic technologies. Recognition for Vedagopuram’s research spans multiple institute-level “first order” medals, research fellowships and other academic distinctions.