Ross Cheloha

honestly respect for the ad that’s just like “pokemon are cool.” they are cool

Gotta believe in your product!

Congrats to Shubhra Jyoti Saha on leading this very successful project in the lab, and our collaborators for making this work possible. Many thanks to NIH Office of AIDS Research and the NIH IRP (NIDDK and NIAID) for supporting this work.

They also retain strong activity against every strain of HIV tested. Such conjugates are even more potent than monoclonal antibodies and fusion inhibitor peptides applied in the clinic.

This was a collaboration with the Bewley and Doria-Rose labs at NIH IRP. Linking fusion inhibitor peptides, which block HIV viral infection with modest potency, to single domain antibodies for delivery to the cell surface, leads to enormous enhancements in antiviral potency (up to 10,000-fold!)

My first corresponding author publication in @jacs.acspublications.org
Very proud and feeling like a bona fide chemist
pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

Lead a lab at Janelia Pioneer next-generation tools for biological discovery Apply by Feb. 3, 2026 janelia.org/groupleader

Apply by Feb. 3 to become a Janelia Group Leader!

Group Leaders drive breakthroughs & experimental approaches in imaging, molecular engineering, protein chemistry, mass spectrometry, & methods that don't yet exist. Learn more: janelia.org/groupleader 🧪

Call For Papers: Chemistry and Biology of Peptides | ACS Publications Chemistry Blog This Special Issue will celebrate the chemistry and biology of peptides, from synthesis, to structure and modifications, to biology and applications, and finally to degradation. Submit your manuscript...

Consider submitting your peptide research to a special joint issue of JOC and Biochemistry on the Chemistry and Biology of Peptides!

axial.acs.org/biology-and-...

Proposed mechanism of receptor-dependent activity of bitopic ligands. Structures of PTHR1 and A2AR used in this panel were generated using Alphafold2.

Bitopic ligands comprise a #pharmacophore & a linked moiety that bind to separate sites. @rche54.bsky.social &co show that #GPCRs that bind small molecules can be potently activated by #bitopic #nanobody -ligand conjugates to selectively target pairs of GPCRs @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4p3VOyH

It’s really meaningful to have such insightful coverage from a leader in the field @zenbrainest.bsky.social and Xianglin Huang. We appreciate the time they took to write up this very nice commentary!

So cool to read this commentary that covers our recent work!
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Thanks Anirban! Glad to see this work released

#chembio 🧪

ii. Recognition that these nanobody-ligand conjugated only show activity when both the nanobody AND ligand targets are expressed (logic gated signaling). This should be useful for delivering molecules with widely expressed targets only to cells of choice! Congrats to Shivani Sachdev and Swarnali Roy

This work described for the first time two new directions we are excited to explore: I. nanobody-small molecule conjugates as a sort of analogue of traditional antibody-drug conjugates but we are targeting GPCRs at the cell surface instead of intracellular targets.

So pleased to share the final version of this work published in @plosbiology.org ! journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Read this in a paper and it was totally new to me (after 18 years in biochemistry research): “Peptides translated from the sense and antisense strands of DNA interact specifically, analogous to the complementary interactions between DNA double strands.” Is this widely studied/actually true?? 🤯

Faculty opening in Cornell Chemistry at the Assistant Professor level in the area of chemical biology, broadly defined! academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30338 #chemjobs

Last day at #ENDO2025 was great! Amazing symposium on bone and calcium disorders 🦴 by @rche54.bsky.social @MichailLionakis @MichaelMannstadt with great talks on GPCRs and nanobodies, JAK inhibitors in APECED syndrome & new PTH therapies 🤩

Annual Nebraska Drug Discovery and Development Pipeline symposium June 25-26 World-renowned experts will offer their insights during the fifth annual ND3P Symposium, set for June 25-26. The symposium will be virtual and highly interactive.

This Wednesday and Thursday is the VIRTUAL Nebraska Drug Discovery and Development Pipeline Symposium! Registration is still open! Plenary speakers include Brian Kobilka and Virginia Man-Yee Lee.

#chemsky, you should attend!

research.unl.edu/blog/annual-...

Check out the final published product in Journal of Biological Chemistry! www.jbc.org/article/S002...

Excited to see this out in @science.org today!! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Next up, a collaboration with Ross Cheloha's group (@rche54 @rche54.bsky.social) and @MitchellHo leveraging a novel self-labeling approach for site-specific modification of nanobodies for biological applications.

doi.org/10.1002/advs...
3/5

It's been a while since I posted on some of the ☢️ #radiopharmaceuticals ☢️ work we've been brewing.

Let's fix that...

🧵👇
1/5

Great news: NIH postbac program is recruiting again! If your grad school plans were affected by program cutbacks or admissions freezes this year I highly encourage you to apply, this could be a perfect opportunity. Please repost.

www.training.nih.gov/research-tra...

Induced proximity at the cell surface - Nature Biotechnology Technologies to modulate induced proximity at the cell surface advance the manipulation of diverse biological responses.

Check out our new review on induced proximity modalities (#TPD and a lot more!) aimed cell surface targets @naturebiotech.bsky.social, spearheaded by postdocs Nick Till and "Rahm" Ramanathan

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The findings suggest that optimizing input parameters and refining competition-based modeling approaches may enhance predictive accuracy for antibody-antigen interactions. Intriguing.

🧪 #chembio

Finally we compared models of nanobody-epitope to nanobody-antigen complexes. In one case Alphafold produced an accurate model with epitope but failed with antigen! This highlights the potential utility of simplifying Alphafold inputs for generating models with improved accuracies (4/4)

We further showed that Alphafold could be used in a competition mode to identify peptides that bound nanobody with higher affinity than the wild type epitope peptide. We also used modeling to guide design of a peptide-electrophile conjugate that forms a crosslink with nanobody (3/n)