Xiongyi Huang
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Chemistry
Building a drug molecule often means adding a new chemical group exactly where you want it. Carbon–hydrogen (C–H) bonds are everywhere in organic molecules, so turning one specific C–H bond into something useful is one of the most direct ways to build or modify a drug candidate.
- Fields
Chemistry
Biochemistry
- Topics
biocatalysis
metalloenzymes
C-H functionalization
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Engineer metalloenzymes — proteins with a catalytic metal center — to perform C–H functionalization reactions absent from natural biology, installing chemical groups of biomedical relevance into organic substrates.
- Use computational modeling of substrate binding and metal-center reactivity to guide protein engineering, predicting which active-site changes should enable functionalization of strong, unreactive sp3 C–H bonds.
- Characterize reaction mechanisms and reactive metal intermediates using biochemical assays together with inorganic spectroscopic methods, to explain how the engineered enzymes activate inert C–H bonds.
- Apply organic synthesis to prepare substrate panels and product standards, mapping the reaction scope and selectivity of the resulting enzyme collections for drug synthesis and diversification.
More about the research
Enzymes are attractive catalysts for this job: they are highly selective, work under mild conditions, and their behavior can be tuned by changing their genes. The problem is that enzymes only know the reactions that natural evolution gave them, and many chemical groups that matter in medicine are rare or entirely absent in biology.
Why it matters
Medicinal chemists need practical ways to install specific chemical groups into drug candidates. Enzymes that functionalize ordinary C–H bonds could make drug synthesis and diversification more selective, more sustainable, and able to reach molecules that current small-molecule catalysts cannot. Because these catalysts are encoded in DNA, they could also be improved by engineering rather than redesigned from scratch.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Peng Liu
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Chemistry
Identify the rate- and selectivity-determining transition states of metal-catalyzed alkene functionalization reactions, using density functional theory and ab initio molecular dynamics simulations.
Michel Gagne
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Chemistry
Develop site-selective and functional group-directed C-H functionalization reactions, which convert specific carbon-hydrogen bonds into new groups, using light-activated organic photoredox catalysts.
Joseph M Bollinger
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Biochemistry
Determine how iron(II) and 2-oxoglutarate-dependent (Fe/2OG) oxygenases direct a common oxoiron(IV) intermediate toward hydroxylation, halogenation, desaturation, or cyclization, and test this by rationally redirecting reaction outcomes.
The school
Johns Hopkins University: 100 labs on PI Pages, $4.1B a year on research, 622 research doctorates a year.
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