Dr. Zoran Radić, Ph.D.

Dr. Radić is a graduate of the University of Zagreb in Croatia where he started his research in acetylcholinesterase (AChE) reaction kinetics under mentorship of late Dr. Elsa Reiner, one of founding contributors in the field of cholinesterases. His interests in molecular structure of AChE brought him to UC San Diego where as a post-doc in the Palmer Taylor group he contributed to functional mapping of the AChE molecule using site directed mutagenesis and defined structural domains and amino acid residues critical for catalytic activity and ligand interaction. He proposed common, simplified kinetic scheme and equation to describe acetylcholine (ACh) turnover by both AChE and its structurally and functionally close relative butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) that included both substrate inhibition of AChE and substrate activation of BChE, two prominent forms of deviation from Michaelis-Menten kinetics. Dr. Radić developed intrinsic tryptophan fluorescence-based assays for in vitro monitoring of time resolved and equilibrium-based interactions of cholinergic ligands with native nicotinic acetylcholine receptor ligand binding domain surrogates, ACh binding proteins (AChBPs), as well as with AChE and BChE. This assay proved essential in functional characterization of one of tightest known, small molecule femtomolar inhibitors of AChE developed in collaboration with Dr. Barry Sharpless of The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla (TSRI). Dr. Radić led and leads, as a PI, NIH funded national and  international collaborative projects with researchers from TSRI, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Dr. Andrey Kovalevsky), University of Utah at Salt Lake City (Dr. Donald Blumenthal), The Ohio State University (Dr. Xiaolin Cheng), UC San Diego (Dr. Carlo Ballatore), New York Structural Biology Center (Dr. Jonah Cheung), Institute for Medical Research and Occupational Health in Zagreb, Croatia (Dr. Zrinka Kovarik), University of Hradec Kralovy, Czech Republic (Dr. Kamil Kuča), University Hospital Hradec Kralovy (Dr. Ondrej Soukup and Dr. Jan Korabecny), towards development of novel, improved oxime reactivators of OP-AChE and OP-BChE conjugates, both in vitro and in vivo.