Geert-Jan Boons

Geert-Jan Boons is the UGA Foundation Distinguished Professor in Biochemical Sciences at the Department of Chemistry and the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center (CCRC) of the University of Georgia (USA) and Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicinal and Biological Chemistry of Utrecht University (The Netherlands).

He received a B.S. and Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Leiden University (The Netherlands) and spent 7 years in the UK, first as a postdoctoral fellow at Imperial College, London, and the University of Cambridge, and then as a lecturer and professor at the University of Birmingham. In 1998, he joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry and CCRC of the University of Georgia, and in 2015 he accepted an academic appointment at Utrecht University.

Among several recognitions, he has received the Creativity in Carbohydrate Science Award by the European Carbohydrate Association (2003), the Horace Isbell Award by the Division of Carbohydrate Chemistry of the American Chemical Society (ACS) (2004), the Roy L. Whistler International Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry by the International Carbohydrate Organization (ICO) (2014), the Hudson Award (2015), and the Cope Mid- Career Scholar Award from the ACS (2016).

His research program deals with the synthesis and biological functions of carbohydrates and glycoconjugates. The diversity of topics to which the group has significantly contributed includes the development of new and better methods for synthesizing exceptionally complex carbohydrates and glycoconjugates.

A hallmark of Prof. Boons’ research program is to employ chemical synthesized target compounds for biological and biomedical explorations and in particular, his research group has made important contributions to the understanding of immunological properties of complex oligosaccharides and glycoconjugates at the molecular level. A highlight has been the design, chemical synthesis, and immunological examination of three-component vaccine candidates that offer a prospect to be employed as a therapeutic vaccine for many types of epithelial cancer. His laboratory is a pioneer in the development of convergent strategies for complex oligosaccharide assembly, which make it possible to synthesize large collections of compounds with a minimal effort for structure activity relationship studies. A highlight of such an approach was the introduction of a chemo-enzymatic strategy that has provided a library of the most complex N-glycans ever synthesized. In addition, his lab was the first to develop an automated system for the rapid enzymatic assembly of complex glycans, which made possible, for the first time, to prepare representative collections of cell surface glycans for the development of the next generation of glycan microarray that can probe the importance of glycan complexity for biological recognition. These efforts have let to identification of glycans for various glycan binding proteins that are being further developed as glycomimetics for drug development for various diseases.

Prof. Boons was the first to employ chiral auxiliaries for the stereoselectively introduction 1,2-cis-glycosides, and this approach is significantly expanding the scope of polymer-supported oligosaccharide synthesis.

The Boons group has also made significant contributions to the development of methods for visualizing glycoconjugates of living cells. They have demonstrated that derivatives of dibenzylcyclooctyne are ideal for strain promoted cycloadditions with dipoles such as azides that can be introduced into glycoconjugates by enzymatic transformations. They have also introduced new chemical reports such as nitrile oxides and nitrones that make it possible to more efficiently label complex glycans of living cells. Using the new labelling methodology, they have established that Niemann-Pick type C (NPC) disease, which is fatal genetic disorder, is associated with a previously unrecognized defect in recycling of glycoproteins. This finding is paving the way for the development of new treatment strategy for NPC disease.