Annaliese Franz and her lab are designing therapeutic molecules of the future. Through organic synthesis and catalysis, the team is building and improving molecules with therapeutic potential. Some current projects include developing a new nanoparticle technology for livestock vaccines and improving treatments for neurodegenerative disorders like epilepsy. 

In nature, organic molecules are either left- or right-handed, but synthesizing molecules with a specific handedness in a lab is hard to do. Make a drug or enzyme with the wrong “handedness” and it just won’t work. Now chemists at the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis are getting closer to mimicking nature’s chemical efficiency through computational modeling and physical experimentation.