Rate My Professor Sunithi Gunasekera

Sunithi Gunasekera is a Lecturer and Researcher in Pharmacognosy at the Department of Pharmaceutical Biosciences, Uppsala University. As a structural biologist with an NMR background, she specializes in determining the three-dimensional structures of natural bioactive peptides from diverse sources including plants, marine worms, scorpions, and marine sponges. Her research explores peptides as drug candidates for therapeutic and diagnostic applications, focusing on antimicrobial activity, rheumatoid arthritis antibody neutralization and diagnostics, protein-protein interactions, and peptide scaffolds for drug design and conjugates. Gunasekera employs synthetic and bioconjugation chemistry to engineer stable peptides that occupy the therapeutic gap between small molecular drugs and larger antibodies or biologics. She follows ethnomedical evidence to discover new drug leads and contributes to capacity building through international collaborations in Sri Lanka and Ethiopia on bioactive peptides. From 2025, her efforts target blood cancer, specifically myeloproliferative neoplasms, by investigating interactions involving mutant calreticulin protein and its neoepitope for targeted peptide inhibitors.

Gunasekera has received major funding, including SEK 3 million from the Swedish Cancer Society for pharmacognosy research and Swedish Research Council grants for projects on stable host defense peptides against infections, bioactive compounds with potential therapeutic applications, biodiversity and chemodiversity of Sri Lankan marine sponges, and precision medicines for autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. Her key publications include "Making Ends Meet: Microwave-Accelerated Synthesis of Cyclic and Disulfide Rich Proteins Via In Situ Thioesterification and Native Chemical Ligation" (2013), "Circular Proteins from Plants and Fungi" (2012), "Fmoc-SPPS based synthesis of bioactive cyclic peptides via N-acylurea intermediates" (2012), "Backbone Cyclization and Dimerization of the Anti-Inflammatory Peptide Cyclo-LL-37" (2020), and "Epitopes Displayed in a Cyclic Peptide Scaffold Bind SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies" (2023). She holds a PhD in Structural Biology from the University of Queensland, Australia, and serves on the department's equal opportunities group while participating in supervisor training and chairing scientific sessions.