Tamara Balsiger is a pharmacist who graduated from the University of Basel and joined the group in 2022. During her master's thesis, she phytochemically investigated plant extracts active on mTOR complex 1 in collaboration with the start-up Aukera.

Her current project involves the screening of an in-house plant extract library for Musashi2 inhibition. Musashi2 is an important protein involved in the process of forgetting. Selected hits were further processed by HPLC based activity profiling for subsequent scale-up isolation & full characterization of the active natural products by HRMS, NMR, ECD and crystallography. The most active compounds were additionally tested in vivo in C. elegans for short- and long-term associative memory improvement. For her work, she won the best poster prize in medicinal chemistry at the Swiss Chemical Society fall meeting 2024.

This project is a close collaboration with the Molecular Psychology group of Prof. Andreas Papassotiropoulos.