Yuen-Ki Cheong

Dr Yuen-Ki Cheong is a RSC Chartered Chemist, who is also a member of the Women Engineering Society. She graduated with MSci in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and her PhD in Chemistry was gained in 2008 at Queen Mary University of London. She has over 8 years of research experience in multi-disciplinary projects involving applied/synthetic/microfluidics chemistry, material/biomaterial sciences and in vitro/ in vivo biological assays.

Her current research interest is focused in the development of a novel class of medically related compound called ‘Trisphosphonate’, where their chemical structures and syntheses were first published in 2014 by Griffiths and Cheong et al. These newly discovered compounds fall in to the same category of a type of drug called the ‘Bisphosphonate’, which is known as the first-line treatments for many bone diseases, skeletal complications involving excessive bone resorption and hypercalcimia associated with bone malignancy. These trisphosphonates also show to have great ability to form complexes with metals, such as Copper, Zinc, Magnesium, Calcium etc. A recent paper (2015) has demonstrated its potential to bind with calcium ions, as a result, it ameliorated the inter-cellular calcium influx and led to neuro-protection in PC12 cells.

As part of the larger project, Yuen-Ki is also working on syntheses of novel nanoparticle conjugates using Trisphosphonates and other biocompatible organic derivatives, with an aim to produce surface treated nanoparticles and their stable suspensions which are suitable for hydrophilic and hydrophobic dispersions.

• Organic and organometallic Chemistry
• Novel materials and biomedical engineerings
• Pharmaceutical and healthcare sciences
• Analytical spectroscopy particularly NMR
• Idenfication of reactive intermediates and elucidation of novel materials

• Spectroscopy theory
• Principle and applications of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance
• Fundamental material sciences
• Research in Sciences