Invited seminar
Author: Prof. Angela Casini
Affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Technical University of Munich, Lichtenbergstr. 4, 85747 Garching, Germany
When: Monday, May 4, 2026 - 12:00 to 13:00
Where: Salón de Actos de l'Edifici d'Investigació II
Presented by: Prof. Macarena Poyatos
Abstract: 

In the context of molecularly targeted therapy and imaging, new chemical strategies and concepts for the making and breaking of bonds are necessary to address some of the limitations of conventional drug design. For example, new approaches to increase overall design flexibility, including the possibility to integrate multiple functionalities within the same system for multimodal imaging/therapy, and to broaden the targeting concept – e.g., to deliver radioactivity to cancer sites within ‘undruggable’ organs such as the brain – are needed.

In this lecture, I will present a few representative examples of unconventional supramolecular approaches from my group to address the aforementioned challenges in the design of pharmaceuticals as dual platforms endowed with targeted therapeutic and diagnostic capabilities. The case studies will include examples of “lantern-shaped” self-assembled [M2L4]4+ cages (M = Pd2+, Pt2+; L = bitopic monodentate N-donor ligand) as multifunctional theranostics.

Biography: 
Angela Casini is Liesel Beckmann Distinguished Professor and Chair of Medicinal and Bioinorganic Chemistry at the Technical University of Munich (TUM, Germany). Between 2021-2026, she held the Chair of Pharmaceutical Radiochemistry ad interim. Angela completed her PhD in Chemistry at the University of Florence (Italy) in 2004, and, afterwards, moved to EPFL (Switzerland) as principal investigator funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Between 2011-2015, she has been assistant professor at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands), holding a Rosalind Franklin Fellowship. Between 2015-2019, she became Chair at Cardiff University (UK), before taking up her current position at TUM in 2019. She is recipient of many awards, including the 2019 ACS Inorganic Lectureship Award and the 2012 European Medal for Biological Inorganic Chemistry. Between 2016-2019 she was Hans Fischer Senior Fellow of the prestigious Institute of Advanced Study at the Technical University of Munich. In 2023, she was elected member of the European Academy of Sciences. Her research centers on investigating the functions of metal ions in biological processes and the ways in which organometallic anticancer agents operate. Furthermore, novel applications for metal-based compounds and supramolecular coordination complexes are explored in various domains of chemical biology, theranostics, drug delivery and medicine. In these fields, she has authored more than 300 publications (including 12 book chapters) with an H index of 80. Personal website full URL: https://www.ch.nat.tum.de/mbc/prof-angela-casini/