Nature Reviews Chemistry, Published online: 04 April 2025; doi:10.1038/s41570-025-00705-7Hypoxic tumours present considerable challenges in cancer treatment owing to their specific chemistry, biology and physics, which leads to resistances to conventional therapies. This Review explores innovative strategies based on supramolecular chemistry to overcome these obstacles and discusses future research directions that might help translating supramolecular approaches to the clinics.

The Technical University of Denmark (DTU) offers the opportunity to build a research group in advanced and applied chemistry at an internationally esteemed department with an excellent infrastructure.

For several decades, molecular motor directionality has been rationalized in terms of the free energy of molecular conformations visited before and after the motor takes a step, a so-called power stroke mechanism with analogues in macroscopic engines. Despite theoretical and experimental demonstrations of its flaws, the power stroke language is quite ingrained, and some communities still value power stroke intuition. By building a catalysis-driven motor into simulated numerical experiments, we here systematically report on how directionality responds when the motor is modified accordingly to power stroke intuition. We confirm that the power stroke mechanism generally does not predict motor directionality. Nevertheless, the simulations illustrate that the relative stability of molecular conformations should be included as a potential design element to adjust the motor directional bias. Though power strokes are formally unimportant for determining directionality, we show that practical attempts to alter a power stroke have side effects that can in fact alter the bias. The change in the bias can align with what power stroke intuition would have suggested, offering a potential explanation for why the flawed power stroke mechanism can retain apparent utility when engineering specific systems.

Browse a list of Bluesky Starter Packs. Discover and connect with your community on Bluesky