It might sound like something out of a classic spy thriller, but University of Minnesota researchers are working on a new antidote for one of history’s most lethal chemical agents: cyanide …

Researchers at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Drug Design have developed a synthetic compound that, in a mouse model, successfully prevents the neurodegeneration associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

In the pre-clinical study, researchers Robert Vince, Ph.D.; Swati More, Ph.D.; and Ashish Vartak, Ph.D., of the University’s Center for Drug Design, found evidence that a lab-made compound known as psi-GSH enables the brain to use its own protective enzyme system, called glyoxalase, against the Alzheimer’s disease process.

The discovery is published online in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience and presents a new target for the design of anti-Alzheimer’s and related drugs …

Robert Vince, Ph.D., is the director of the Center for Drug Design in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Medicinal Chemistry.

Robert Vince started off at the University of Minnesota as an undergraduate professor in the 1960s. He has since established the University of Minnesota’s Center for Drug Design (CDD).

Albeit impressive and commendable, his title of director is just the beginning of the gamechanging work he has been a part of while at the University of Minnesota. Vince is a little more modest about the term.

“I don’t know if I’d call it gamechanging,” says Robert Vince. “It’s just what I do.”