Tyler received his PhD in Chemical Biology from the University of Michigan, where he worked in the lab of Dr. John Tesmer. His graduate work focused on understanding the structural basis of GPCR kinase regulation. Additionally, he worked on structure-based drug design targeting NF-kB kinases in collaboration with Dr. Alan Saltiel. In 2018, he joined the lab of Dr. Michael Eck at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School as a postdoctoral research fellow, where he studies combination drug therapies for targeting mutant EGFR in non-small cell lung cancer.

Shruthi Bharadwaj is a Senior Scientist at Novartis within the Informatics and Analytics group. She received her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Florida and continued her research as a post-doctoral fellow at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. Shruthi has been interested and involved in utilizing AI and machine learning approaches in Pharma. She has a patent that involves machine-learning approach to predict the onset of colon cancer in patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease. She has won several NIH grants that supported her research in leveraging AI approaches in healthcare. She has published several research articles, book chapters and abstracts that focus on AI approaches in diagnosis and drug development.

Dr. Blanchard is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Li-Huei Tsai’s laboratory at the Picower institute at MIT. Prior to this Joel completed doctoral student at The Scripps Research Institute and received a master’s degree in Biotechnology from Harvard University. His research aims to understand the cellular and molecular pathways underlying the risks for neurodegenerative disease. To achieve this, he combines stem cell biology with tissue engineering to build tractable models of the human brain. In combination with single-cell transcriptomics from the human brain, these experimental models are providing insight into complex disease processes and uncovering new therapeutic opportunities.

John got his Ph.D. from the Scripps Research Institute in 2003. Since then, John’s research has focused on using display technologies, immune approaches and an array of protein engineering approaches for antibody discovery and bi and multispecific antibody engineering at multiple companies – Genentech, Trubion, Emergent BioSolutions, and Novartis. John leads antibody discovery at NIBR in Cambridge, where they use a mix of display and immunization approaches coupled with high throughput screening to find and optimize antibodies for a variety of therapeutic modalities and indications.

Laird Bloom is a Senior Director in the BioMedicine Design Department at Pfizer, where he heads a group focused on identification and engineering of antibody-based therapeutic leads, and high-throughput production of milligram-scale quantities of purified antibodies for the department. Since joining the company in 2003, he has managed the antibody engineering activities in numerous therapeutic programs supporting all Pfizer research units, with an emphasis on allergic and inflammatory diseases and cancer. From 1999-2003, he led a cell biology and assay group involved in mRNA display and screening at Phylos, Inc.

Dr. Bonifant is a pediatric oncologist on the blood and marrow transplantation team at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center and an apsistant Professor of Pediatric Oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She is also a member of the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Immunotherapy. Her clinical specialty is stem cell transplantation for high-risk leukemias. Her research interests are in the areas of immunotherapy of cancer and malignant hematology. Currently, her research focuses on design and development of immune therapies as a treatment for poor-prognosis cancers, including development of engineered cellular immunotherapies for the treatment of acute myeloid leukemia.

Darrell Borger is Associate Director of the Translational Oncology program in Takeda’s Oncology Drug Development Unit and Head of the Integrated Translational Technologies Laboratory. With over a decade of previous experience in a large academic hospital, Darrell is working to integrate promising technologies, informatics, and cancer research to drive novel drug development strategies in immune oncology and provide a continuum of translational biomarker development into early clinical evaluation.

Dr. Bowrey is a research fellow at Rutgers Brain Health Institute. She is a retinal specialist and is currently developing therapeutic approaches that exploit the retina as a 'window into the brain' for the purpose of treating brain disease.

CEO & CSO

Dr. Brehm received his PhD from the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Program in Molecular Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and a member of the UMass Diabetes Center of Excellence. Dr. Brehm’s research program is focused on understanding how human effector T cells are regulated, and his laboratory is actively using “humanized” mice to model human T cell responses. Dr. Brehm has published over 70 manuscripts and reviews and is supported by funding from the JDRF, NIAID, NIDDK and the Helmsley Charitable Trust.

Dr. Zachary Britton received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Delaware in 2012, where he developed protein engineering approaches to aid in the expression and purification of GPCRs under Prof. Anne Skaja Robinson. He joined MedImmune/AstraZeneca in 2012, where he has led membrane protein-related efforts in Protein Science and now Antibody Discovery functions. He currently leads leads the phage display group in Antibody Discovery and Protein Engineering and has co-led multiple pipeline biotherapeutic programs in infectious disease and oncology. Zack last presented at Discovery on Target in 2018 and is excited to be back again this year.

North American Business Development Manager

Dr. Butt obtained a Ph.D. degree in Molecular Biology from The University of Glasgow, Scotland, He was a Staff Fellow at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, before joining SmithKline Beckman (now GSK) Pharmaceuticals. He also served as an Adjunct Professor Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of Pennsylvania Medical School, Philadelphia. Dr. Butt has published more than 100 papers in life sciences research, raised several million dollars of capital, and launched highly innovative and profitable biotechnology companies.

Katherine M. Call has focused in translational sciences and biologics, having established capabilities and identified and validated disease genes/drug targets and advanced biologics into development and established. She is Senior Director and Head, Proteogenomics in Translational Sciences at Sanofi. Previously, Dr. Call led the global establishment of Sanofi Discovery Biotherapeutics and was Head, US Biologics Research. As a co-founder of the Cambridge Genomics Research Center in 1997, Dr. Call’s team established molecular genomic platforms and applied these to identify and validate bone and cancer therapeutic targets. This joint venture demonstrated strong value and was acquired by Sanofi in 2000. She joined Sanofi as Head of Molecular Genomics. She went onto be Global Head, Genomics Technology Management. She initiated Sanofi’s External Research Strategy and Innovation in Boston and led large strategic alliances. Dr. Call holds a Bachelor degree in Biology with highest honors from UC Santa Cruz. At MIT, she earned a PhD in Applied Biology and did postdoctoral training in human genetics/genomics at the Koch Center where she cloned a Wilms’ tumor gene. This landmark was the second tumor suppressor gene and one of the first disease genes isolated based on genetic and genomics. She was a faculty member at Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School, a key investigator on NIH Human Genome grants, has published 35 scientific papers and holds technology and therapeutic patents. Dr. Call has served extensively in external scientific communities - on grant review panels, as a committee member and Deputy Editor for human chromosome 10, and in a consultant and advisory board capacity to life sciences companies & organizations and pharma consortia.

Professor Michelangelo Campanella is an Italian-born Pharmacologist who found home in the United Kingdom where he moved in 2005 as EMBO/MARIE CURIE Postdoctoral Research Fellow after completing a PharmD (USA intercalated) and earning a PhD in Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology. Internationally recognized as an expert in the cell biology and pharmacology of mitochondria, he is currently Chair in Pharmacology at the Department of Comparative Biomedical Sciences of the Royal Veterinary College (University of London) where he leads a Research Unit. Recipient of numerous competitive prizes in research he is currently serving in editorial boards of various scientific journals, as well as in committees of national and international funding agencies (e.g., BBSRC, Italian Health Ministry). His research focuses on the mechanisms controlling cell response to stressors, the quality of mitochondrial function, signaling and interaction with other organelles. His work has informed the current understanding of bioenergy and dynamics interplay of the mitochondria for which he has devised pharmacological regulators. His dedication to biomedical research, academic support and service to scholars earned him the Paul Harris Fellowship from the Rotary Foundation in 2014 and the Talented Young Italian Award in 2015. In the same year, he was named Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology. In 2018 he was one of the 12 UK based recipients of the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Award in Life Science. The H-index of Professor Campanella is equal to 60 and is sole inventor of a patent on Predictive Mechanisms of Drug Attritions on which he does not hold any financial competing interests.

Dr. Jingsong Cao is a principal scientist working at Rare Diseases and Metabolic Research, Moderna Inc. Dr. Cao has over 15 years of drug discovery experience, spanning from the early phases of drug discovery to the identification of molecules for clinical candidates. Prior to joining Moderna, Dr. Cao has been working at a number of pharmaceutical companies including Eli Lilly, Wyeth/Pfizer, and Novartis. Dr. Cao’s research areas have covered Metabolic Diseases, Oncology, and Liver Rare Diseases. He was among the first in identifying several important genes encoding enzymes in triglyceride and phospholipid biosynthesis in mammalian cells, and co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed papers and a number of patents. Dr. Cao holds a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from China Pharmaceutical University, and did postdoctoral research from University of Kentucky. Dr. Cao also has received trainings from MIT and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories.

Life Sciences Technology Platform High Content Reagents Leader

Jun Chen is a senior scientist, group leader and postdoc advisor in Genentech. He built and led the current group working on ion channel and GPCR drug discovery. Prior to Genentech, Jun held positions at AbbVie and University of Utah. His experience spanned all phases of preclinical drug discovery. His main research interest is exploring ion channel biophysics and pharmacology, and applying mechanistic insights to the development of therapeutics.

Zhao earned his PhD from Dartmouth College. He was a translational oncologist specialized in developing and utilizing murine cancer models to better understand tumorigenesis and treatment mechanisms. Zhao is currently leading the mouse modeling efforts to dissect the tumor microenvironment in the Exploratory Oncology Program at Novartis.

Dr. Chen is Chief Medical Officer of Metacrine, a clinical-stage pharmaceutical company building an innovative pipeline of best-in-class drugs to treat liver and gastrointestinal diseases. He previously served as Chief Scientific and Medical Officer of Pfenex, where he oversaw research & development and led multiple interactions with the US FDA, EMA and Japan's PMDA. During his tenure, Pfenex successfully designed and executed the clinical and nonclinical development of Bonsity, a teriparatide injectable for the treatment of high-risk osteoporosis. Previously, Dr. Chen served as vice president of clinical development at Aileron Therapeutics, filing the first IND and Orphan Drug Designation application for the Stapled Peptide technology. Before Aileron, Dr. Chen was vice president of translational medicine at Regulus Therapeutics, overseeing development strategies for microRNA-based medicines in atherosclerosis, fibrosis, and hepatitis C infection. Before Regulus, Dr. Chen was senior director of clinical research and corporate development at Amylin Pharmaceuticals, supervising next-generation obesity and diabetes programs. He started his biotech career as associate director of medical sciences at Amgen, serving as development leader in metabolic disorders and osteoporosis programs.

Chen joined the Yale Faculty in 2015 as an assistant professor in the Department of Genetics and Systems Biology Institute, also as a member of the Yale Cancer Center and the Yale Stem Cell Center. Chen earned a PhD in evolutionary genetics from The University of Chicago with an award-winning dissertation with Dr. Manyuan Long. After graduation he performed postdoctoral studies at MIT under the mentorship of Dr. Phil Sharp, and also the Broad Institute working with Dr. Feng Zhang. His research focuses on providing a global understanding of biological systems. Chen developed and applied genome editing and high-throughput screening technologies, precision CRISPR-based in vivo models of cancer, global mapping of functional drivers of cancer oncogenesis and metastasis. More recently, he developed novel systems that enable rapid identification of novel immunotherapy targets and new modalities of cancer immunotherapy. Dr. Chen received a number of national and international awards including the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, Damon Runyon Cancer Research Fellow, Dale Frey Award for Breakthrough Scientists, AACR NextGen Award for Transformative Cancer Research, TMKF Innovative/Translation Cancer Research Award, BCA Exceptional Research Grant Award, MRA Young Investigator Award, V Scholar, Bohmfalk Scholar, Ludwig Family Foundation Award, St. Baldrick’s Foundation Award, CRI Clinic & Laboratory Integration Program (CLIP), MIT TechReview Regional 35 Innovators, and Sontag Foundation Distinguished Scientist Award.

The Chiosis lab uses a chemical biology approach to understand, diagnose, and treat cellular processes associated with chronic molecular stress, with the ultimate-goal of developing novel therapeutic strategies for use in the clinic (https://www.chiosislab.com/). The Chiosis lab has authored over 150 scientific articles on biomedical subjects that span the gamut from chemical probe discovery, medicinal chemistry, drug discovery and development, bioinformatics methods development, mechanistic and translational investigations. It holds over 350 patents and patent applications which are related to the discovery of novel compounds as therapeutic agents or diagnostics in human medicine, and to methods of treatment. Novel compounds and diagnostics discovered by the lab are the platform for the development of inhibitors currently in clinical evaluation in Alzheimer’s disease and in cancer patients.

Dr. Jacky Chung completed his PhD at the University of Toronto and subsequent post-doctoral training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. After a short stint as Interim Principal Investigator at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, he joined Sachdev Sidhu’s laboratory as a Scientist, at the University of Toronto where he heads efforts to study ubiquitin enzymes using protein engineering.

Senior Scientist & Group Leader

Senior Scientist & Group Leader

John M. Conley is William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor of Law at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He holds an A.B. from Harvard and a J.D. and Ph.D. in anthropology from Duke. He teaches intellectual property and the law of biotechnology and has written several books and numerous articles on the law of intellectual property as applied to emerging technologies, scientific evidence, and other topics in law and science. His current research focuses on the international governance of CRISPR gene editing. He is of counsel to the law firm of Robinson, Bradshaw & Hinson of Charlotte and Chapel Hill, NC, where he focuses on intellectual property, privacy, biotechnology, and international law. He speaks regularly on law and science topics to audiences in the United States and internationally.

Dr. Neil Conlon is an Irish Research Council EPS postdoctoral fellow with the Molecular Therapeutics for Cancer group at the National Institute for Cellular Biotechnology (NICB), Dublin City University. His research aims to identify novel treatment options for HER2-driven cancers. Dr. Conlon completed his BSc (Double Hons) in Biology and Chemistry in 2013. He obtained his PhD in Cancer Biology in 2018, which focused on identifying mechanisms of resistance to HER2-targeted therapies in breast cancer. He was recently awarded the European Association for Cancer Research junior investigator award at the Irish Association for Cancer Research 2020.

Adrienne D. Cox, PhD, is Professor and Chief of the Division of Cancer Research in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). She is also Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and a member of the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, where she directs the Cancer Cell Biology T32 Training Program. She has studied cancer-driving RAS proteins for many years, covering a range of questions about the role of RAS in basic mechanisms of cancer biology to efforts to improve treatment of RAS-driven cancers such as those of the pancreas, lung and colon, head and neck, and melanoma. In addition to publishing research and reviews, Dr. Cox teaches graduate courses, consults for pharmaceutical and biotech companies, serves on mentoring committees, grant review panels and external advisory boards. She enjoys speaking with other scientists and the public about biomedical research.

Dr. Cremasco grew up in the north of Italy and received her Master’s degree in Medical Biotechnology from the University of Milan. In 2007, she moved to Washington University in St. Louis, MO for her Ph.D. training, where her studies focused on the characterization of the signaling pathways activated downstream of ITAM-associated receptors in myeloid cells and osteoclasts during rheumatoid arthritis and bone metastasis. She then joined the laboratory of Dr. Shannon Turley at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for her post-doctoral training, where her research addressed the cellular and molecular mechanisms governing stroma-immune cell cross talk in lymphoid organs. Dr. Cremasco moved to Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research as an independent Investigator in 2015, in the department of Immuno-Oncology. Work in her lab aims at broadening our current understanding of stroma-immune interactions, with particular emphasis on stromal-imposed immunosuppression in the tumor microenvironment.

Lead

CEO

I completed my MS in Biochemistry with advanced Microbiology and my PhD on the transcriptional profile of Vibrio cholerae during diarrhea. I characterized the function of a new gene cluster (IAHP; IcmF Associated Homologous Proteins; later classified as Type VI secretion system) involved in enteric infection. During my Post Doctoral career, I characterized the function of the immuno-inhibitory molecule PDL1 during Helicobacter pylori infection and the host DNA repair pathway during gastro-intestinal infection.

Dr. Datta is currently Senior Director of Antibody Discovery & Engineering at Scholar Rock. His group is responsible for the discovery and engineering of potential therapeutic antibody molecules using a variety of antibody display and/or immunization strategies. Prior to joining Scholar Rock, Dr. Datta was a Scientist in the Antibody Display group at Biogen where he led a number of therapeutic antibody discovery and engineering campaigns using yeast display and B-cell cloning technologies. Dr. Datta has a PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago and received his post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School/Children’s Hospital Boston.

Dr. Ben Davis is a Research Fellow at Vernalis Research, a biotech company based in Cambridge UK which has been at the forefront of fragment-based approaches since 1998. An NMR spectroscopist and biophysicist by training, his current research focus is the development of biophysics and FBLD methods for challenging therapeutic targets and systems. Dr Davis studied for his PhD in protein folding and molecular interactions with Professor Alan Fersht at Cambridge University, and then studied the interactions of small molecules with proteins and RNA. He has over 20 years’ experience in the drug discovery industry. He has contributed to seven books over the last decade and is an author on more than forty scientific publications. He is a frequent speaker at scientific conferences and has been running FBLD training workshops since 2007.

Ben Deverman is the director of the Vector Engineering research laboratory within the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His group is focused on developing adeno-associated viral (AAV) vectors that enable targeted gene delivery to cells within the brain using high-throughput screening and selection methods. Prior to joining the Broad in March 2018, Deverman and colleagues at Caltech developed numerous AAV vectors, including AAV-PHP.B and an enhanced variant, AAV-PHP.eB, that cross the mouse blood-brain barrier to deliver genes throughout the central nervous system more than a hundred-fold more efficiently than the prior state-of-the-art AAV9. AAV-PHP.B and the enhanced variant AAV-PHP.eB are now in use in hundreds of laboratories around the world and are enabling a wide range of translational and basic science experiments.

Justin Dietrich obtained a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from The University of Arizona, College of Pharmacy in 2008 under the instruction of Laurence Hurley, Ph.D. and Gary Flynn, Ph.D. After graduate school, he worked in the high-throughput medicinal chemistry lab of Chris Hulme, Ph.D. as a post-doc and research scientist. He joined Abbott labs in 2011, where he has worked in the scaffold- oriented synthesis, high-throughput chemistry, fragment-based drug discovery, and DNA-encoded library technology teams.

Dr. Dimitrov graduated and completed his PhD at the University of Sofia, Sofia, Bulgaria, and thereafter he worked in the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences where he defended his ScD and was Professor of Biophysics until he joined the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA, in 1990. There he was tenured as Senior Investigator and appointed at the Senior Biomedical Research Service. He joined the University of Pittsburgh in 2017 as the Director of the new Center for Antibody Therapeutics (CAT) and Professor of Medicine. He is expert in display/screening/libraries methodologies, antibody engineering, and protein biochemistry as well as in mathematical modeling, immunology, virology, physical chemistry and biophysics. His major long-term goal is the development of clinically useful therapeutics and vaccines against cancer, viruses and aging based on human monoclonal including engineered antibody domains, chimeric antigen receptors, antibody drug conjugates, full size antibodies, bispecific antibodies and antibody-based fusion proteins. Two of the antibodies (to CD22 and mesothelin) he and his group identified and characterized, and his collaborators further developed, are in clinical trials for therapy of cancer, and one (to the envelope glycoproteins of Hendra and Nipah viruses) was approved for clinical use on compassionate basis for therapy of the disease caused by these viruses. He has authored or coauthored more than 400 articles cited more than 28,000 times, several books and is inventor or coinventor of more than 100 inventions, patent applications or patents.

John G. Doench is an Institute Scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. In that capacity, he provides expert guidance on the design, execution, and analysis of genetic screens. He has contributed to numerous publications in fields such as infectious disease, cancer biology, and immunology, highlighting both his commitment to team-based science and ability to mentor and guide scientists from diverse backgrounds on the critical principles of genetic screens. Additionally, as the Director of R&D in the Genetic Perturbation Platform (GPP), John leads a group focused on the development of functional genomic techniques, first with RNAi and more recently with CRISPR technology. Here, his team demonstrated the potential of genetic screens with CRISPR and has since developed leading bioinformatics tools and screening libraries to enable community-wide usage of this powerful technology. Importantly, their efforts emphasize not only staying on the cutting-edge of newest approaches but also focusing on the reduction-to-practice that is critical for enabling collaboration with a broader community of researchers working in diverse and challenging model systems. Prior to joining the Broad in 2009, John did his postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School, received his PhD from the biology department in Phil Sharp’s lab at MIT, and majored in history at Hamilton College. John lives in Jamaica Plain, MA with his wife and daughter, where he enjoys screaming for the Red Sox and Patriots, playing volleyball, running, and avoiding imminent death while navigating the streets of Boston on a bicycle.

Dario earned a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. He conducted postdoctoral studies with Sir Derek Barton at Texas A&M University. His industrial career includes Rohm & Haas, Schering-Plough Research Institute, 3-Dimensional Pharmaceuticals, Gliatech, Neurogen, Lundbeck, CoNCERT, Sage and Sunovion, where he currently works in teams aiming at the discovery of new treatments for brain diseases. Dario contributed to the discovery of the PAR-1 antagonist vorapaxar and the clinical compounds NGD-4715 (anti-obesity), Lu AF09535 (anxiolytic), and CTP-692 (currently in Phase 2 studies in schizophrenia). Dario coauthored over 100 articles, patents or patent applications, and book chapters, and edited the book Allosterism in Drug Discovery. Current interests include molecular concepts at the chemistry/biology interface to enhance the translatability of preclinical research.

David is a Partner and current Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Longwood portfolio Company Axial Biotherapeutics. David is an accomplished business development and strategy executive with extensive leadership experience and a track record of building companies. Prior to joining Longwood, David has held various leadership roles at biopharmaceutical companies including AbbVie (NASDAQ: ABBV) and GSK (NYSE: GSK). At AbbVie, David served as Vice President & Global Head of Ventures and Early Stage Collaborations where he led a global team that completed significant transactions across multiple therapeutic areas and stages of development. Prior to AbbVie, David served as Vice President Global New Deal Strategy and Development at GlaxoSmithKline, and Senior Manager at Accenture’s Strategic Services Consulting Group. David holds a BA in Chemistry from St. Anselm College, a Ph.D. in Polymer Chemistry from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and an MBA from the University of North Carolina. He currently serves on the Board of Alcyone Life Sciences, a privately held CNS company which he co-founded.

Amber C. Donahue, PhD is a Senior Manager, Biomarker Clinical Assay Lead in the Oncology Clinical Assay Group in Global Product Development at Pfizer. She is responsible for scientific technical oversight and operational management of external and internal partners performing clinical trial biomarker sample analyses aligned with translational oncology strategies. Prior to joining Pfizer in early 2015, she developed and validated esoteric testing assays for the Hematology/Oncology R&D group at Quest Diagnostics-San Juan Capistrano. Amber holds a PhD in Molecular Biology & Biochemistry, with a focus in Immunology, from the University of California, Irvine.

Katherine Donovan is a Scientist in the Fischer Lab where she works on the development of molecular-glues and PROTAC molecules for targeted protein degradation. She completed her PhD training in protein biochemistry and structural biology at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. After joining the Fischer Lab as a postdoc she developed an interest in proteomics and now leads the proteomics-based screening of novel small molecule degraders in the Fischer Lab.

Matthew Eddy received his PhD in physical chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the laboratory of Professor Robert Griffin. During his PhD, Dr. Eddy developed new approaches for using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) in the solid state to determine structures of membrane proteins in cellular-like environments. Following his PhD, Dr. Eddy joined the laboratories of Professors Raymond Stevens and Kurt Wüthrich at The Scripps Research Institute as an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow, applying an integrative structural biology approach to study human G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) and focusing on applications of nuclear magnetic resonance to improve our understanding of GPCR allosteric functions. Dr. Eddy is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Florida and affiliated faculty of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. His group continues to study human GPCRs to understand the role of the cellular environment in regulating GPCR dynamics, structure, and function.

In the past 21 years Istvan J Enyedy has been involved in new target evaluation, in hit finding, in structure- and ligand-based hit-to-lead optimization, and in building machine learning models for predicting ADMET properties of compounds. He is coauthor on more than 50 publications and 14 patents/applications. He received his PhD in 1998 at Catholic University of America, Washington DC, and did postdoctoral training in Dr. Shaomeng Wang's group at Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington DC. Between 2001 and 2008 he worked at Bayer Pharmaceuticals, West Haven CT and Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in Cambridge MA.

Vice President

Scott Eron is a proud native of Syracuse, New York, where he grew up in the snowy suburbs. He found a passion for science and pursued a bachelor’s degree in chemistry at SUNY Geneseo. He completed his PhD in Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he studied the regulation of caspases under Professor Jeanne Hardy. Scott was fascinated by structural biology from his very first day of graduate school and has applied this interest toward understanding the molecular details of caspase inhibition and activation. At C4, Scott continues to develop his structural biology skill set with a focus on crystallography and HDX-MS to understand degrader-induced ternary complexes. Beyond science, Scott enjoys the outdoors, good craft beer, and Syracuse basketball.

Senior Director

Dr. Esposito is currently the Director of the Protein Expression Laboratory (PEL) and Project Lead for the RAS Reagents Core at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research in Frederick, Maryland. The 33 employees in the PEL clone, express, and purify proteins from a variety of host organisms in support of the NCI RAS Initiative and for investigators at the National Institutes of Health. In addition, the PEL invents and develops novel technologies for improving protein expression and production, focused heavily on baculovirus expression technology and combinatorial cloning. Prior to his role as director, Dr. Esposito led the Clone Optimization Group in the PEL for nine years and was responsible for the generation of over 15,000 expression clones, 400 new expression vectors, and several technological innovations in protein expression. Dr. Esposito received his B.A. in Chemistry at La Salle University in Philadelphia, and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry in the laboratory of Dr. John Scocca at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School where he studied bacteriophage site-specific recombination. Dr. Esposito then worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Robert Craigie at the NIDDK, where he studied the protein-DNA interactions involved in the HIV integration reaction. Prior to joining the FNL in 2001, Dr. Esposito worked for three years as a Staff Scientist in the Protein Engineering group at Life Technologies, where he helped to develop the Gateway recombinational cloning system. Dr. Esposito has published more than 70 peer-reviewed manuscripts in the fields of protein expression and DNA recombination.

Deyu Fang is currently the Hosmer Allan Johnson Professor in the Department of Pathology at Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine, where he has been since 2009. He received a B.S. from Weifang Medical University in 1991 followed by a three-year training as a resident in Department of Medicine in China. He then received his Ph.D. in Molecular Virology from Gunma University School of Medicine in 2000. From 2000 to 2003 he was a postdoctoral fellow in La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology. After a two-year instructor position in University of Michigan Medical Center, he started his independent academic career as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Departments of Otolaryngology at University of Missouri School of Medicine. His research interests span both immunology and cancer biology. Much of his work has been on understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying peripheral immune tolerance at a contact of autoimmunity and antitumor immune therapy, as well as identifying therapeutic targets to treat inflammation, metabolic disorders and cancer.

Abdelfattah was born in Lyon, France. Initially trained as a Biochemist, he got a Master’s degree in Drug Sciences from the University Claude Bernard Lyon 1. He then pursued his scientific career with a PhD in Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Sciences in the Bioactive Molecule and Medicinal Chemistry (B2MC) team of Dr. Marc Le Borgne in Lyon (France) and as a visiting doctoral student at the University of Montreal (Canada) with the Pr. Valérie Gaëlle Roullin. His doctoral dissertation was focused on the syntheses, biological evaluations and the nanoformulations of small functional anticancer compounds (CA-4 derivatives and DYRK kinase inhibitors). He is currently working on the development of novel fentanyl/carfentanyl derivatives and other ligands with improved potency and selectivity toward the opioid receptors.

Dr. Ferguson received her MSc in Chemistry from Imperial College London, and her PhD in Chemistry from the University of Cambridge. At Cambridge, Fleur worked in the laboratories of Professors Chris Abell and Alessio Ciulli where she used fragment-based ligand discovery techniques to evaluate the ligandability of bromodomains as the target class, and develop inhibitors of BAZ2B. Fleur joined the laboratory of Professor Nathanael Gray at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute as a postdoctoral fellow in 2015. Her postdoctoral work has focused on employing medicinal chemistry techniques to generate high-quality chemical probes, and using them to investigate the biological functions of understudied kinase targets, such as CDK14 and DCLK1. In addition, Fleur is also interested in targeted protein degradation; here she is using chemoproteomic approaches to understand the chemical and cellular variables that contribute to successful small molecule induced degradation across the kinome, and applying targeted protein degradation to clear misfolded tau proteins in dementia.

Professor of Biochemistry and Chair of the Department of Experimental Therapeutics, Medical University of South Carolina. Director of Research, Hollings Cancer Center. Chief Scientific Officer, CharlestonPharma, LLC.

Virneliz Fernández Vega is an Assay Development Scientific Associate in the Lead Identification/High Throughput Screening Division in the Department of Molecular Medicine at the Scripps Research in the Florida Campus since 2008. Her main focus involves the utilization of a state-of-the-art HTS robotics platform to screen large compound libraries for drug discovery of a multidisciplinary range of therapeutic areas including cancer, autoimmune diseases, neurological disorders and infectious diseases. She develops and implements biochemical and cell-based assays compatible for uHTS campaigns. In addition, she is implementing and studying 3D cell culture models for drug screening using HTS automation. Before joining Scripps Florida, Mrs. Fernández Vega worked at the University of Miami studying the gene expression of transcription factors involved in breast cancer and tumor growth development. Prior to joining University of Miami in 2002, she worked in the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases in the Epidemiology Section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institute of Health in Bethesda, MD. Her primary focus was the characterization of the Norwalk virus N-terminal protein. Mrs. Fernández Vega graduated from the University of Puerto Rico with a major in Microbiology in 2001.

No bio available.

Dr. Fisher is the Chief Scientific Officer at C4 Therapeutics, a new biotechnology company focused on the selective recruitment of targets to E3 ligases for ubiquitination and degradation by the ubitiquin/proteasome system where he is responsible for strategic delivery of the project portfolio and collaboration management. Prior to joining C4, Dr. Fisher was the Director of Enzymology and Quantitative Biochemistry in the Center for the Development of Therapeutics at the Broad Institute. His group focused on the mechanistic analysis and quantitative assessment of protein:ligand interactions required for therapeutic discovery. Prior to joining the Broad Institute, Dr. Fisher spent 15 years at AstraZeneca in the Infectious Diseases Innovative Medicines Unit, where he led numerous antibacterial programs that progressed through Phase I clinical trials and was the Executive Director, Biological Sciences. His department supported the entire drug discovery project portfolio, from target validation to pharmacodynamics modeling in support of Phase III candidates. In addition, Dr. Fisher spent 2 years at Hoffmann LaRoche leading drug discovery programs in Metabolic Diseases. Dr. Fisher received his B.A. in Chemistry at the University of Vermont and Ph.D. in Chemistry at Caltech and was a National Institutes of Health Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Harvard Medical School with Professor Christopher T. Walsh.

No bio available.

Senior Director & Research Therapeutic Area Head

Dr. Fuentes has extensive drug discovery experience in fibrotic, inflammatory and respiratory diseases. At Blade Therapeutics, she oversees biology and translational research, leading a group that has made important contributions to the understanding of mechanism of action for lead molecules and in discovery of pathway related biomarkers. Before joining Blade, Dr. Fuentes was Group Director, Fibrosis Discovery Biology at BMS where her focus was to deliver small molecules and antibody therapeutics for the treatment of fibrotic diseases including IPF and NASH. Prior to BMS, Dr. Fuentes worked at Roche where she was Head of the Respiratory Diseases Group within the Inflammation Therapy Area. Her group advanced several projects to clinical trials. Dr. Fuentes received her PhD from the Catholic University of Chile and worked as a Fogarty postdoctoral fellow in the Pharmacology Department, School of Medicine, University of California San Diego.

Dr. Gallardo received his PhD in 2008 from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas C. Südhof where his thesis focused on studying α-synuclein a presynaptic protein involved in Parkinson’s disease. His major studies demonstrated α-synuclein-induced neurodegeneration involves central pathological mechanisms implicated in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) signifying parallels in the pathogenesis for these degenerative diseases. Dr. Gallardo next performed his post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School where he discovered the enrichment of the ion pump α2-Na/K ATPase in astrocytes in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). An in-depth biochemical and molecular characterization revealed the chronic activation of the α2-Na/K ATPase mediates the non-cell autonomous motor neuron neurodegeneration in an ALS mouse model. Upon joining the laboratory of Dr. David M. Holtzman at Washington University School Medicine he obtained his NIH-K01 Career Development Award and was appointed to the faculty as an Assistant Professor of Neurology in 2017. His laboratory focuses on understanding astrocytes and their cellular mechanisms of neuroinflammation and in the development of immunotherapeutic approaches for potential therapeutic intervention of neurodegenerative diseases.

Dr. Evripidis (Evris) Gavathiotis is Professor of Biochemistry and Medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and faculty member of the Albert Einstein Cancer Center, the Institute for Aging Research, and the Wilf Family Cardiovascular Research Institute. He received his BSc in Chemistry at the University of Crete, Greece and his PhD in biological chemistry from the University of Nottingham, UK. He completed postdoctoral research at Rockefeller University and at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and he was junior faculty at Harvard Medical School. In 2011, he started his lab at Einstein and became tenured full professor in 2019. His research focuses on mechanisms and protein interactions in cell death and cell survival signaling and the discovery and optimization of small molecule modulators towards novel chemical tools and therapeutics. He has pioneered mechanistic insights of BCL-2 family proteins and other key signaling proteins and has discovered first-in-class small molecules for several targets.

Dr. Narender Gavva is the Head of Early Target Discovery at Takeda (supporting GI, IO, Neuro, Rare disease indications). He has over 20 years of experience in drug discovery leading innovative groups of scientists and projects covering molecular biology, human genetics target ID & validation (TIDVAL). He is also serving as Takeda Scientific Lead for Open Targets consortium. He has broad experience in TIDVAL to clinical teams (evaluation of new technologies, automated HTS assays, focused screens, hit/lead identification, lead optimization, clinical candidate selection, and research rep on clinical teams). He has a strong record of planning, completing programs and delivering clinical candidates (e.g., AMG 333). He is the cross-functional and cross-site project team leader (PTL – small molecule, antibody, and peptide programs) and has contributed to research reports, patents, or IND/IBs. AMG 517, AMG 333, AMG 747, AMG 334 (erenumab/aimovig™).

Chief Science Officer

Davide Gianni currently leads the Cellular Assay Development team in Discovery Sciences (AZ) in Cambridge UK. The main focus of the team is to deliver the cellular assay portfolio for key therapeutic areas for AZ. He joined AZ in August 2015 from Boehringer-Ingelheim (Vienna) where he was in charge of leading a team of scientists to identify and validate drug target for oncology drug discovery. Davide got his PhD from University of Naples (Italy) and completed his postdoctoral studies at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in La Jolla before relocating to Europe. He has authored >20 peer-reviewed publications and review articles in high impact journals covering several scientific areas including cancer and molecular biology, neurodegeneration and drug discovery.

Dr. Giugliano, MD is a Senior Investigator with the TIMI Study Group, Staff Physician in the Cardiovascular Division at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He graduated Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa (Mathematics) from Dartmouth College (1985), receiving a medical degree at Harvard Medical School (1989). Dr. Giugliano completed residency and chief residency at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (UCLA affiiliate,1989-93) and cardiology fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital (1993-6). In 1996, Dr. Giugliano joined the Brigham and Women’s Hospital as a Medicine Research Fellow in the Thrombolysis in Myocardial Infarction (TIMI) Study Group directed by Eugene Braunwald, and completed a Science Masters (Epidemiology) at the Harvard School of Public Health. In 1997, he joined the Cardiovascular Division faculty of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and has served as the principal investigator for 9 multicenter clinical trials at TIMI. His areas of research interests include novel antithrombotic, fibrinolytic agents, and lipid-lowering therapies, and patient outcomes following Acute Coronary Syndromes (ACS). He has authored more than 400 articles and chapters, and delivered hundreds of lectures. Dr. Giugliano is the Principal Investigator for the VESALIUS-CV trial of the PCSK9 inhibitor evolocumab in patients at high risk for cardiovascular events with no prior MI or stroke, and also the ENGAGE-AF TIMI 48 trial of the factor Xa inhibitor edoxaban in 21,105 patients with fibrillation. He is also a member of the Operations Committees and Lead TIMI Investigator for the FOURIER trial studying evolocumab in 27,564 hyperlipidemic patients with prior cardiovascular disease; the IMPROVE-IT trial evaluating ezetimibe in 18,144 patients post ACS; and the EARLY ACS trial of eptifibatide in 9492 patients with ACS. Dr. Giugliano serves on numerous Data Safety Monitoring Boards, clinical endpoint committees, and Holter/ECG Core Laboratories. He actively participates in the clinical activities of the Cardiovascular Division, attending in the Levine Cardiac Intensive Care Unit, telemetry unit, and consult services, and sees patients in a busy growing outpatient practice.

Aaron is a faculty member and Principal Investigator at Harvard Medical School where he is Director of the Drug Resistance Group and Associate Bioengineer in the Division of Engineering in Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. His group uses multiple scientific disciplines to study cancer drug resistance including mathematical modeling, computational biology and nanomedicine and human-derived tumor models. Aaron is also an Entrepreneur in Residence at Xontogeny, an investment group focused on early stage companies. Prior to that, he held leadership roles in industry as the Director of R&D and Head of Immuno-Oncology at Farcast Biosciences, a company focused on personalized cancer medicine.

Dr. Shawn Gomez is a Professor in the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at UNC-Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University and the Department of Pharmacology at UNC-Chapel Hill. He received his BS and MS in Aerospace Engineering Sciences from the University of Colorado at Boulder and his EngScD in Biomedical Engineering from Columbia University in New York City. Subsequent training in bioinformatics and computational biology were as a postdoctoral fellow at the JP Sulzberger Columbia Genome Center and as a Florence Gould Scholar and Pasteur Foundation Fellow at Institut Pasteur in Paris, France. Since 2017, he has been the Director of FastTraCS, a component of the NC Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute, focused on accelerating innovation in therapeutics and MedTech translational research at UNC and the broader NC healthcare system. Dr. Gomez's research focuses on integrating computational and experimental approaches towards improving our understanding of the architecture and dynamics of the kinome and its role in cell signaling and human disease.

Eric Grazzini obtained his Ph.D in Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Pharmacology in 1996, studying the role of G protein-coupled receptors in steroids release from human and rat adrenal gland. After a post-doctoral fellowship at McGill University’s Royal Victoria Hospital, he served for 16 years within a major pharma company as a pharmacology/molecular biology project leader and manager. He has extensive experience in biologics and small molecule assay development and mechanistic analysis. He possesses deep expertise in the biology of GPCRs, ion channels, and transporters. In 2003, he received the AstraZeneca R&D Global Scientific and Technical Achievement Award for the de-orphanization of 6 orphan GPCRs that produced four new projects in two different therapeutic areas. Eric has authored over 25 publications appearing in Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Cell Biology, and PNAS. In 2014, he joined the NRC as Senior Research Officer and has since been appointed as Team Leader, Rapid Protein Production. His mission at NRC is to lead staff as well as R&D projects related to biologics and GPCRs in collaboration with industrial, academic, and government partners.

CEO

Anna Greka, MD, PhD, Institute Member and Director of the Kidney Disease Initiative at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School; Associate Physician in the Renal Division in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Founding Director of Kidney-NExT at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School Anna Greka is an institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she directs the institute’s Kidney Disease Initiative. Greka is a physician-scientist leading the translation of scientific discoveries from the laboratory to clinical trials. She is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School (HMS); an associate physician in the Renal Division in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH); and the founding director of Kidney-NExT, a Center for Kidney Disease and Novel Experimental Therapeutics at BWH and HMS. The Greka laboratory specializes in connecting human genetic and genomic discoveries to disease mechanisms and ultimately to therapeutics for a wide array of diseases. Her team focuses on a detailed, mechanistic understanding of disease pathways and circuits as the foundation for the development of targeted therapies. Specifically, the Greka lab studies mechanisms of cell survival and metabolic regulation, including calcium signaling and transient receptor potential (TRP) ion channel biology. Applying this expertise to the study of kidney podocytes, the laboratory identified a specific TRPC5 channel blocker as the first mechanism-based therapeutic strategy for FSGS, a progressive kidney disease. Based on this discovery, TRPC5 inhibitors are now being tested in the clinic. More recently, significant effort has been directed toward understanding the mechanisms leading to toxic proteinopathies, diseases caused by mutations that result in misfolded proteins, such as MUC1 kidney disease. Greka and her team discovered that these proteins become trapped in the early secretory pathway by a cargo receptor called TMED9. They went on to identify a promising therapeutic lead (BRD4780) that can clear misfolded MUC1 and other toxic proteins from cells. The Greka laboratory is also interested in using the modern tools of genomics and other multi-omic approaches to understand the mechanisms of disrupted cellular metabolism, with important connections to obesity and diabetes. Finally, the study of ion channel biology remains an active area of investigation for the group, with a special focus on harnessing the considerable therapeutic potential of ion channels for a wide range of diseases, from kidney disease to neuropsychiatric and neurologic disorders. Greka has been the recipient of several honors, including the 2018 Seldin-Smith Award for Pioneering Research from the American Society of Clinical Investigation, a 2017 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, a 2014 Top 10 Exceptional Research Award from the Clinical Research Council, and a 2014 Young Physician-Scientist Award from the American Society of Clinical Investigation Council. She also serves on the Harvard-MIT MD-PhD Program Leadership Council. Greka holds an AB in biology from Harvard College and an MD and PhD in neurobiology from HMS. She received her medical and scientific training in the Harvard-MIT program in Health Sciences and Technology in the laboratory of National Academy of Sciences member David Clapham, where she explored the role of TRP channels in neuronal growth cone motility.

Prof. Linda G. Griffith received a Bachelor's Degree from Georgia Tech and a PhD degree from the University of California at Berkeley, both in chemical engineering. Griffith’s is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Popular Science Brilliant 10 Award, NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, the MIT Class of 1960 Teaching Innovation Award, Radcliffe Fellow and several awards from professional societies.

Dr. Karl Griswold is an Associate Professor of Bioengineering at the Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth. His research has resulted in the development of new tools for protein deimmunization, enhanced microbial protein expression systems, innovative high throughput screens for recombinant protein libraries, and powerful antibacterial agents for drug-resistant infections. He studied as a DOW Chemical Foundation Scholar at Texas State University, graduating summa cum laude in 1995. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2005 and subsequently completed a postdoctoral fellowship under Professor George Georgiou. Dr. Griswold’s recent honors include a ‘Granite State Technology Innovation Award” from the NHIRC, a “Teacher of the Year” award from the Thayer School, and an “Award in Translational Biomedical Engineering” from the Coulter Foundation. He has coauthored more than 50 peer-reviewed articles and is an inventor on 3 issued US patents and 4 pending patent families. He is the co-founder and CEO of the Occulo Family of biotech startups, which employ proprietary protein engineering and deimmunization platforms and are advancing numerous programs with biopharma partners.

Dr. Gygi received his Ph.D. from the University of Utah in Pharmacology and Toxicology in 1995 specializing in small molecule mass spectrometry. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Ruedi Aebersold at the University of Washington where he studied large molecule mass spectrometry in a new field termed proteomics. He started his own lab in 2000 at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Cell Biology. Currently, his lab is working to develop technologies around sample multiplexing. A 16plex TMT reagent set is now available. This allows for 16 treatments to be combined into a single experiment including replicates, dose response, time series, and rescue conditions. In this single-experiment format, proteomics becomes a powerful biological assay.

Jill Hallin is a Principal Scientist at Mirati Therapeutics in the Research department, where her focus is on preclinical target validation, pathway biology, in vitro and in vivo pharmacology and model development for novel targeted therapies. Previously, Jill worked at Pfizer for 15 years supporting various oncology drug discovery programs, with expertise in cancer epigenetics, cell cycle, and signal transduction disciplines. Her work at Mirati is currently centered on KRAS biology and translational pharmacology, where her team helped to profile and successfully advance MRTX849, a potent and selective KRAS G12C inhibitor, into the clinic.

Dr. Hanash was recruited to MD Anderson Cancer Center in 2011 to lead the Red and Charline McCombs Institute for Cancer Early Detection and Treatment. He was previously program head for Molecular Diagnosis at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Dr. Hanash’s interest and expertise are in the field of cancer diagnostics and the development of blood-based cancer biomarkers for risk assessment and cancer early detection. He is the inaugural president of the International Human Proteome Organization dedicated to the study of the human proteome, and a founder of the US Human Proteome Organization. Dr. Hanash’s approaches to meet the challenge of developing markers that signal the presence of cancer at an early stage to allow detection and effective treatment have included a rigorous painstaking in-depth quantitative profiling of the various types of molecules in the blood to find those that are released early either from the cancer cells or from the host response to the developing cancer. The work emphasizes the need for rigor in experimental design, in data collection and statistical analysis and in developing a mechanistic understanding of the relationship between the identified cancer markers and the developing cancer. This work has sparked innovation in experimental design and statistical analysis of biomarker data aimed at minimizing biases in discovery studies through prospective sample collections that relate most directly to the intended clinical application(s) and at reducing the false discovery rate through integration of data from multiple sources to increase confidence in the significance of the markers.

Dr. Hanyaloglu is currently a Reader in Cell Biology at Imperial College London, where she has been a PI since 2007. Her PhD in Molecular Endocrinology commenced at the MRC Human Reproductive Sciences Centre, Edinburgh, however, a move to Perth, Australia resulted in her PhD being awarded from the University of Western Australia. Following her postdoctoral training with Professor Mark von Zastrow (UCSF), she joined Imperial College London. Her research interests focus on understanding the fundamental cell biological mechanisms regulating signalling of diverse GPCRs, including the spatial control of receptor activity and homo/heteromerization of GPCRs, including application of single-molecule super-resolution imaging. In concert with dissecting fundamental mechanisms, her work also has a strong focus on the translation of fundamental cellular mechanisms to understanding GPCR activity in health and disease and identification of novel therapeutic strategies. Her research is currently funded by BBSRC, MRC and Wellcome Trust.

PhD in Immunology studying cancer immunotherapy at Dartmouth College Department of Microbiology and Immunology. Trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) under the supervision of Thomas Wynn.

Traver Hart earned his PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology at the University of Texas at Austin, focusing on systems biology of yeast, his doctoral work merged high-throughput experiments with computational analysis. This training proved useful during his postdoc with Dr. Jason Moffat at the Donnelly Centre, University of Toronto, when the CRISPR revolution came to cancer research. Working with the Moffat lab’s cadre of experienced shRNA screeners, Dr. Hart designed one of the first genome‐scale CRISPR knockout libraries, and this group was among the first to show how CRISPR screens could identify genotype‐specific essential genes in cancer cell lines from different lineages and with different oncogenic drivers. He continues his work in cancer functional genomics and CRISPR technology development as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioinformatics & Computational Biology and the Department of Cancer Biology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Chief Scientific Officer

At Genentech, I have been involved in the management of in vivo antibody discovery projects to support research and development with a focus on therapeutic projects, including antibodies that have moved forward to clinical trials, as well as overseeing various aspects of automation and discovery technology/process development within the Antibody Engineering department.

Kevin Heyries (Co-founder of AbCellera, Head of Business Development) holds a PhD in biochemistry (University of Lyon, France, 2008) where he developed miniaturized microfluidic technology for antibody analysis. During his postdoctoral work at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Heyries created high-throughput microfluidic systems for digital PCR and single-cell genomics application. Dr. Heyries is a co-founder of Vancouver-based AbCellera and has been involved with the development of its therapeutic antibody discovery platform that combines proprietary immunizations, microfluidics, high-throughput imaging, genomics, deep computation, artificial intelligence, and laboratory automation. Dr. Heyries has led antibody discovery programs and now leads the company’s business development and strategy activities. Dr Heyries is also a 2018 TEDx speaker, a long-distance trail runner and a trained ski racing coach.

Dr. Steve Hitchcock is Head of Research for Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, Ltd. He joined Takeda in 2012 via Takeda’s acquisition of Envoy Therapeutics where he was Senior Vice President of Drug Discovery and also held the position of Adjunct Professor at The Scripps Research Institute. Prior to Takeda, Dr. Hitchcock had served in senior leadership positions in the research organizations at Eli Lilly and Amgen. He received a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from The University of Nottingham (U.K) and completed a NATO postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University. Over a career spanning 23 years in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology arena, Dr. Hitchcock has been fortunate to work with teams that have developed therapeutic drug candidates spanning a variety of disease indications. He places a strong emphasis on early establishment of pharmacodynamic-pharmacokinetic relationships and translational biomarkers, including the development of drug-target occupancy tracers, and is a recognized expert in the area of blood-brain barrier permeability and small molecule entry into the CNS. Dr. Hitchcock also has a keen interest in structure-based and computational property- and ligand-based drug design principles and applications of biophysics and fragment-based approaches to drug discovery. He is a co-author on over 70 patents, patent applications, papers and review articles.

Dr. Cory M. Hogaboam is a Professor of Medicine in the Women’s Guild Lung Institute at Cedars Sinai Medical Center. Dr. Hogaboam is also an Adjunct Professor of Pathology at the University of Michigan Medical School. His research group currently employs genomic, proteomic and bioinformatic approaches to analyze mechanisms contributing to fibrotic and immune system-directed responses in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), lung cancer, sarcoid, hypersensitivity pneumonitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and asthma utilizing human tissue and blood-derived cells including fibroblasts, mesenchymal progenitors and various immune cell types present in abundance in these pulmonary diseases. His group also uses translational approaches through the development of humanized SCID mouse models of IPF, cancer, and asthma. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Zoology from the University of Calgary, AB, Canada in 1989. He also holds a Doctorate in Pharmacology (1993) from the same institution. Dr. Hogaboam then engaged in Postdoctoral training in Immunology at McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada from 1993 to 1996. In 1996, Dr. Hogaboam joined the faculty of the Department of Pathology at the University of Michigan Medical School as a Visiting Scholar. He became a faculty member of the Department at the rank of Research Investigator in 1998, Assistant Professor in 2002, Associate Professor in 2004, and full Professor in 2008. Dr. Hogaboam joined the faculty at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in September of 2013. Hogaboam is a member of several professional organizations including the American Association of Immunologists, the American Thoracic Society, and the American Association of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. He is presently serving on the editorial board of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine and the Journal of Clinical Investigation Insight. Dr. Hogaboam has authored or co-authored approximately 281 peer-reviewed manuscripts and 31 book chapters. He has authored or co-authored 11 patents on therapeutic interventions for lung and liver. Dr. Hogaboam has received financial research support from the National Institutes of Health, American Lung Association, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and several Industry sponsors.

Dr. Liaoyuan Hu is currently the Scientific Director, Head of in vitro Pharmacology at Amgen Asia R&D Center. He is leading the effort to build various technology platforms to support Amgen innovative drug discovery. Before joining Amgen, Liaoyuan worked at Eli Lilly and Lexicon Pharmaceutics as Principal Scientists, and was responsible for target validation, compound screening and SAR support for drug discovery programs. Liaoyuan earned his PhD degree in Cellular Physiology and Molecular Biophysics from University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and did his postdoctoral training on GPCR signaling transduction in Dr. Lefkowitz’s lab at Duke University.

Yinghui Hu is an associate principal scientist at Neuroscience Department, Merck Research Laboratory. She is an accomplished scientist with 14 peer-reviewed publications. She got her Ph.D from Neuroscience Program Boston University. Her training was completed in a postdoctoral fellowship at Boston University School of Medicine focused on the regulation of GABA A receptor in Epilepsy. Prior to joining Merck, she worked as a senior scientist at Biogen for four years where she led early discovery projects for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Multiple Sclerosis. Since 2015, she has worked at Merck and played a key role in establishing several in vitro and in vivo platforms to support new drug discovery projects against ALS. Currently, she is a project leader for early discovery projects against neurodegeneration diseases at Merck.

Catherine has spent over 23 years acquiring significant depth of experience in antibody drug discovery and platform applications, working for cutting-edge biotech and pharma companies, such as Cambridge Antibody Technology and Heptares Therapeutics. She has been engaged as an independent consultant since 2015, providing scientific and strategic consultancy to pharma, biotech and investors, with a particular focus on GPCRs, ion channels, immuno-oncology, platform positioning and target/product evaluation. Catherine graduated with BSc Hons in Genetics and Cell Biology from University of Manchester, UK, and a PhD in Biochemistry and Applied Molecular Biology from UMIST, UK.

Dr. Laura Itzhaki has over 20 years’ experience leading academic research in the field of protein engineering. She has a BA in Chemistry (Oxford) and PhD in Biochemistry (Cambridge). From 2003 to 2011 her group was located at the MRC Cancer Cell Unit in Cambridge UK, and she is currently a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Cambridge. In 2019, she secured seed finance for PolyProx Therapeutics to develop biotherapeutics harnessing the cell’s quality-control machinery to destroy disease-associated proteins that cannot be targeted by conventional drug modalities.

Dr. Vibha Jawa is currently a Director, Predictive and Clinical Immunogenicity group within Preclinical Development at Merck. She is responsible for developing a strategy and provides oversight and management of scientific programs for discovery, development and optimization of biologics and vaccines. In this role, she is partnering with discovery and development groups to design better molecules. Dr Jawa received her bachelors in Biochemistry (1991) from Delhi University and her doctorate in Biochemistry/Immunology (1998) from All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India with a thesis work studying the immune mechanisms behind autoimmune diseases followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at University of Pennsylvania on monitoring the immune response to viral vectors. She continued to work in the field of gene therapy company evaluating viral vectors for hemophilia therapy in the Bay area followed by City of Hope Cancer Centre Stem Cell and Gene Therapy group and at Amgen from 2003-2016. Her current research interests include evaluating immune response biomarkers for early drug development and efficacy, immunogenicity prediction using in silico, in vitro and in vivo technologies, modeling impact of immunogenicity on PK and PD and their application to a systems based approach, antigen processing and presentation and the role of T cells in immune response to drug products. Vibha is a member of multiple professional organizations like American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS), American Association of Immunology (AAI) , European Immunogenicity Platform and Federation of Clinical Immunology Society (FOCIS). Within AAPS, Vibha has been actively involved as a Steering Committee member of the Therapeutic Protein Immunogenicity Focus Group (TPIFG) and is currently leading the Immunogenicity Risk Assessment and Mitigation Working Group (IRAM). She is also a co-lead of the Industry Innovation and Quality consortium for Cell/viral/gene therapies. Dr. Jawa also serves as a manuscript reviewer for The AAPS Journal , Clinical Experimental Immunology and J.Pharm Sci Journal. Dr. Jawa has published over 50 papers and her articles in the Nature Genetics, Annals of Hematology and Clinical Immunology journals have been cited over 2500 times. She is the recipient of the 2015 Ebert Prize from the American Pharmacists Association for her work on assessing risk of critical quality attributes in a humanized mouse model system.

Dr. Pushpa Jayaraman is a Senior Investigator within Immuno Oncology at Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research where she leads a research team responsible for the evaluation of novel immunotherapeutics targeting tumor promoting inflammation within the tumor microenvironment. Prior to NIBR, she worked as an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital on dissecting the role of TIM-3, an immune checkpoint molecule in regulating innate and adaptive immunity during chronic bacterial infection. Dr. Jayaraman earned her doctorate in Pathobiology at the University of Washington, Seattle where she evaluated the role of neutralizing antibodies in modulating HIV disease course in elite controllers, and mother-to-child transmission. At NIBR, Dr. Jayaraman continues to work on TIM-3 and IL-1b and her team is involved in various stages of drug development, ranging from target discovery and validation to supporting translational efforts in the clinic.

Dr. Jenkins obtained his bachelor’s degree in biology at the University of Virginia in 2002 and his MD/PhD at the Medical University of South Carolina in 2012. He completed his internship and residency in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2014 and his clinical oncology training in the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center in 2017. He conducted his post-doctoral research in David Barbie's lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute where he developed a novel platform to study ex vivo response to PD1- blockade using organotypic tumor spheroids. In 2018 he joined the faculty at the MGH Cancer Center in the Center for Melanoma and Center for Cancer Research. Dr. Jenkins is the inaugural Termeer Early Career Investigator in Systems Pharmacology and a member of the Laboratory for Systems Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. The Jenkins laboratory studies mechanisms of response and resistance to PD-1 blockade with a focus on developing rational combination therapies to overcome resistance to cancer immunotherapy.

WuXi AppTec, VP, Head of Oncology & Immunology Unit

Dr. Jian Jin is an internationally recognized medicinal chemist with more than 20 years of experience in small-molecule drug discovery. He is currently the Mount Sinai Endowed Professor in Therapeutics Discovery, Professor in Departments of Pharmacological Sciences and Oncological Sciences, and the Director of the Mount Sinai Center for Therapeutics Discovery at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Jin is also a Co-Leader of the Cancer Clinical Investigation Program at The Tisch Cancer Institute. Dr. Jin’s laboratory is a leader in discovering selective inhibitors of histone methyltransferases, novel degraders targeting oncogenic proteins, and biased ligands of G protein-coupled receptors. Dr. Jin received a Bachelor’s of Science degree in chemistry from University of Science and Technology of China in 1991 and a PhD in organic chemistry from the Pennsylvania State University in 1997. After completing a post-doctoral training at the Ohio State University, Dr. Jin joined GlaxoSmithKline as a medicinal chemist in 1998 and had been a manager of medicinal chemistry from 2003 to 2008. In 2008, Dr. Jin joined the Division of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) as an Associate Professor. He had also served as an Associate Director of Medicinal Chemistry in the Center for Integrative Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery at UNC from 2008 to 2014. Dr. Jin was recruited to Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai as a professor with tenure in 2014. Dr. Jin has published close to 200 peer-reviewed papers and delivered >100 invited talks. He is also an inventor of approximately 60 issued U.S. patents and published international patent applications.

COO

Douglas Johnson is a Senior Director of Chemical Biology & Proteomics at Biogen in Cambridge, MA. Prior to moving to Biogen, Doug was at Pfizer for 18 years where his most recent position was Senior Scientific Director and Head of Chemical Biology in Cambridge, MA. Prior to Pfizer, Doug was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University in the laboratory of Professor David A. Evans. He obtained his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute under the guidance of Professor Dale L. Boger and graduated summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota with a BS in chemistry. He is an author or inventor on more than 90 publications and patents.

Dr. Jingfang Ju is the Professor at Renaissance School of Medicine, Director of Cancer Biology Program of Stony Brook Cancer Center, Stony Brook University. He is the scientific Co-Founder of Curamir Therapeutics Inc. He is the inventor of miRNA based cancer therapeutic platform technology and he holds a number of patents in this field. Dr. Ju has over a decade of research experience on non-coding microRNA in cancer with a focus on resistance mechanism. He has over 100 academic publications. In addition to having an NIH/NCI funded translational research laboratory, he was a recipient of the Glaxo Wellcome Oncology Clinical Research Scholar Award. He received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Northeastern University in China, Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from University of Southern California, and post-doctoral fellowship in molecular pharmacology at Yale University.

William Kaelin obtained undergraduate and MD degrees from Duke University and completed his internal medicine training at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he served as chief medical resident. He was a clinical fellow in medical oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of David Livingston, during which time he was a McDonnell Scholar. He is currently the Sidney Farber Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School. A Nobel laureate, Dr. Kaelin received the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Dr. Kaelin is a member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation, the American College of Physicians, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. He recently served on the NCI Board of Scientific Advisors, the AACR Board of Trustees, and the IOM National Cancer Policy Board. He has received numerous awards, including the MSKCC Paul Marks Prize, the AACR Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Prize, a Doris Duke Distinguished Clinical Scientist Award, the Canada International Gairdner International Award, the ASCI Stanley J. Korsmeyer Award, the Scientific Grand Prix of the Foundation Lefoulon-Delalande and the Institute of France, the Albert Lasker Prize, the Helis Award, and the Massry Prize.

Kamm’s interests lie at the interface of biology and mechanics, formerly in cell and molecular mechanics, and now in micro-physiological systems to model cancer and neurodegenerative disease. Kamm has fostered biomechanics as Chair of the US National Committee on Biomechanics and of the World Council on Biomechanics and currently directs the NSF Center on Emergent Behaviors of Integrated Cellular Systems. He is a recipient of the Lissner Medal and the the Huiskes Medal, both for lifetime achievements, and is the inaugural recipient of the Nerem Medal for mentoring and education. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine since 2010. Kamm is founder of AIM Biotech, a company that markets microfluidics for 3D cell culture systems.

I am a Senior Scientist at AstraZeneca in the Chemical Biology and Proteomics Group of Discovery Sciences since 2013. Before that I was a lead chemist in the fragment-based lead generation group and medicinal chemist in Oncology at AstraZeneca. During this time I have contributed to several drug discovery projects making it to the clinic and developed assays such as CEllular Thermal Shift Assay (CETSA) and in-cell Chemoproteomics to measure cellular target engagement and target validation for multipass transmembrane protein receptors. In 2017, AstraZeneca awarded me a prestigious award as Breakthrough Scientist for "Innovative techniques for profiling target engagement and selectivity for multipass transmembarne proteins". Multipass transmembrane receptors have been challenging to study because of complexities in isolation and detection. These assays have worked successfully for multipass transmembrane receptor proteins which are not readily amenable to traditional biophysical methods. At AstraZeneca, we are using these assays successfully on multiple drug discovery projects at different stages like hit identification to lead optimization and to clinical candidates. We have published our work in ACS Chemical Biology https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31329413. I am a module leader for Proteomics course at Cold Spring Harbor Labs where participants get in-depth knowledge about chemoproteomics techniques routinely used in industry, with class lecture followed by lab work and deep dive into data analysis. Before joining AstraZeneca I worked at Vertex Pharmaceuticals as a medicinal chemist. I obtained my MS in Organic Chemistry from the University of Georgia at Athens in 2005 with Professor Geert-Jan Boons.

Beginning his career as a synthetic chemist, Terry Kenakin received a PhD in Pharmacology at the University of Alberta in Canada. After a postdoctoral fellowship at University College London, UK, he joined Burroughs-Wellcome as an associate scientist for 7 years. From there, he continued working in drug discovery for 25 years first at Glaxo, Inc., then Glaxo Wellcome and finally as a Director at GlaxoSmithKline Research and Development laboratories at Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA. Dr. Kenakin is now a professor in the Department of Pharmacology, University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill. Currently he is engaged in studies aimed at the optimal design of drug activity assays systems, the discovery and testing of allosteric molecules for therapeutic application, and the quantitative modeling of drug effects. In addition, he is Director of the Pharmacology graduate courses at the UNC School of Medicine. He is a member of numerous editorial boards, as well as Editor-in-Chief of the “Journal of Receptors and Signal Transduction”. He has authored numerous articles and has written 10 books on Pharmacology.

Dirk Kessler is currently Scientific Director at Boehringer Ingelheim Regional Centre Vienna, Austria leading the Structural Biology Group in Oncology Research (Dept. Medicinal Chemistry) .Dirk started his career with Boehringer Ingelheim in 2004 as Principal Scientist and Research Laboratory Head for Protein Crytallography and is in his current role since 2015 being responsible for the early NCE portfolio and hit-finding strategies with a strong focus on fragment-based screening approaches for the so-called undruggable targets. He received his PhD in Biochemistry/Protein Crystallography in 2004 at the Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg/Germany with Professor Georg E. Schulz.

Dr. Khattar is an immunologist at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, where he is leading efforts within Immuno-Oncology to leverage the immune-phenotypic features of anti-cancer agents and is engaged in designing next-generation approaches for cancer immunotherapy, particularly cell and gene therapies. Dr. Khattar’s previous research has focused on discovery of novel, antigen-specific immune therapies for cancer, autoimmunity and transplantation; involving modalities like CAR T cells, personalized cancer vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, and small molecule inhibitors. Prior to Takeda, he has held positions at Agenus Inc., Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Khattar received his Ph.D. in Immunology from the University of Toledo Medical Center.

Jonathan Kim obtained his B.S. in Biochemistry at Syracuse University, and fulfilled both an M.A. in Biotechnology and a Ph.D. in Physiology and Cellular Biophysics at Columbia University. During his Ph.D., he determined the structure of PfCRT, an integral transmembrane protein associated with antimalarial drug resistance, by coupling his extensive membrane protein expression and biochemical skills to cutting-edge single-particle cryogenic electron microscopy.

Lindsay King is currently a Director in the Clinical Pharmacology department at Pfizer, in Cambridge, MA where he leads a biomarker clinical assay team. Prior to this, led a team within the Translation Sciences Biomarker and Biomeasures group with a primarily focus on using conventional, imaging and mass cytometry to support mechanistic modelling and simulation and early biotherapeutics portfolio progression. He has held roles in Pfizer as scientific leader in the GLP Biotherapeutics Bioanalytical Centre of Emphasis supporting the global portfolio, as a leader of a non-regulated group responsible for LBA based bioanalysis of biotherapeutics, immunogenicity and biomarker/biomeasures and as a full-time large molecule DMPK departmental project team representative. Lindsay received his PhD from the University of Toronto (Ontario, Canada) and his Honors BSc from the University of Western Ontario (Ontario, Canada).

Ralph Kleiner was born in Syracuse, NY and attended Princeton University, where he received an A.B. in Chemistry and performed research on the de novo design of 4-helix bundle proteins in the laboratory of Michael Hecht. He then completed his Ph. D. in Chemistry at Harvard University under the direction of David Liu, where he used DNA-templated chemistry to identify novel macrocyclic inhibitors of Src kinase and Insulin-Degrading Enyzme (IDE). He went on to conduct his postdoctoral studies as a Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellow with Tarun Kapoor at The Rockefeller University. His postdoctoral work used chemical proteomics to study phosphorylation-dependent protein-protein interactions in the DNA damage response. In September 2016, Ralph began his appointment as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Princeton University. His research lies on the interface of chemistry and biology, focusing on the development and application of novel chemical approaches to study post-transcriptional “epitranscriptomic” modifications occurring on cellular mRNA. He is a recipient of the Damon Runyon Dale F. Frey Award for Breakthrough Scientists, the Sidney Kimmel Foundation Scholar Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

No bio available.

No bio available.

Dr. Lakshmi Krishnan is the Director General of the NRC's Human Health Therapeutics Research Centre. As a globally recognized researcher and expert in the field of infectious diseases and cancer, she is committed to the development of novel therapeutics and innovative solutions for the improvement of human health. Dr. Krishnan joined the NRC in 1998 and, as a research officer, built expertise in immunology research at the Institute for Biological Sciences, in the areas of vaccine adjuvant development and host pathogen interactions. Prior to her current appointment, she was the Program Lead for Vaccines and Immunotherapy (2015 to 2018) and Director of R&D for Immunobiology (2016 to 2018). Possessing extensive research expertise in the fields of vaccinology and therapeutics development, over the course of her career Dr. Krishnan has been the recipient of numerous competitive research grants from various agencies including the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH – USA). She also chairs the Federal Vaccine Research Innovation and Development committee, which consists of membership from 13 different federal departments across the Government of Canada. Dr. Krishnan received her Master's degree in Bio-medical Genetics from the University of Madras (India) and Ph.D. in Immunology from the National Institute of Immunology in India, following which, she completed post-doctoral studies at the University of Alberta through an Alberta Heritage Foundation scholarship. She serves as an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Ottawa and has mentored many graduate students. She also volunteers with several organizations for mentoring leadership skills among youth, and has published over 70 primary research articles in peer-reviewed journals, and is listed as an inventor on several patents.

Dr. Suresh Kumar is a cell biologist and biochemist with several years of specific expertise in ubiquitin research. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Dr. Serge Fuchs, a pioneer ubiquitin scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied the role of ubiquitin in regulating key cytokine receptors. He discovered that the E3 ubiquitin ligase SCFβ-TrCP degrades the IFNalpha receptor, reducing the efficacy of IFNalpha in treating malignant melanoma. Dr. Kumar was also instrumental in establishing the roles of kinases in ubiquitin pathway mechanisms. In addition, he has contributed to the fields of immunology and antiviral therapeutics. In his current role as Senior Director of R&D at Progenra, Dr. Kumar has responsibilities in lead discovery and lead optimization. A major focus of Dr. Kumar is the development of small molecule immune-oncology drugs targeting the ubiquitin pathway enzymes.

Director, Product Development

Jean Labrecque is a scientific leader with a strong strategic/business perspective in R&D and has more than 17 years’ experience in management in the Pharma & Biopharma industry. A courageous leader with proven experience in building strong and highly engaged research teams. Seen has a leader in innovation and a molecular pharmacology expert who provides mentoring to others in a broad range of target class (GPCR, Ion channel, enzymes). A strong contributor to multiple aspects of preclinical research (CRO management, due diligence for in-licensing, basic research, applied drug discovery: target validation, medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, and all preclinical aspects of drug discovery). Experience in managing and coordinating the in vitro biology component of research in CNS (neurology, pain & inflammation) and in cancer (biologics) for program ranging from target identification to lead optimization. As a manager of the translational department at National Research Council of Canada in human heath therapeutic, Jean has developed cross-functional skills and built strong relationships with team members from cell biology, antibody discovery/engineering, advanced analytics, downstream and upstream processes, CMC, protein chemistry, safety, translational sciences and in vivo biology. Managed various teams in assay development, cell & molecular biology, in vitro profiling/screening and electrophysiology and high-throughput screening. Experience in governance process in biosafety, biosecurity, radioprotection program, capital asset management (instrument) and active member in various global business reference group (R&D career pathways, biosecurity risk registry, mammalian cells forum, ion channel initiative, CNSP R&D informatics forum). PhD in Pharmacology, postdoctoral work at AZ R&D Montreal. Goal: Develop and contribute to highly effective drug/biologic discovery team that will deliver innovative therapeutic to address unmet medical needs and impact positively patient health.

Madhu Lal-Nag is the Program Lead, Research Governance Council, Office of Translational Sciences, Center for Drug Evaluation & Research at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Dr. David Langenau is a Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School and the Associate Chief of Research in Pathology at the Massachusetts General Hospital. His work is focused on using zebrafish as a discovery tool for uncovering important biology and new therapies for the treatment of cancer

I have a broad background in high-throughput biology, protein engineering, and antibody discovery. My graduate training focused on the development of high-throughput approaches to examine the sequence-structure-function relationships within proteins. This included high-throughput pipelines for protein production and purification, as well as assay development. My background in technology development further blossomed as a postdoctoral fellow in George Georgiou’s lab where I co-invented a pair of complementary antibody discovery techniques using next-gen DNA sequencing (BCR-Seq) and serum antibody proteomics (Ig-Seq). This work led to the first study in which the serum IgG response to vaccination in humans was delineated at a molecular level. Following my postdoc, I continued to hone my antibody discovery expertise at Pfizer BMD in Cambridge, MA and then co-founded a startup biotech company in Wakefield, MA that focused on the use of microfluidics and yeast display for antibody discovery. I recently returned to Austin to rejoin the labs of Professors Gregory Ippolito and George Georgiou to pursue a non-tenure track professorship at UT Austin.

VP & Head

Jonathan Levenson is the Vice President of Translational Biology at Tiaki Therapeutics. Prior to joining Tiaki, he was the head of preclinical and nonclinical research and development at Proclara where he was key in moving two assets into the clinic, one for Alzheimer's disease and one for systemic amyloidosis. Before that, Jonathan worked at Galenea where he held positions of increasing responsibility, culminating in the role of senior scientist. Jonathan was an assistant professor and the director of the rodent behavioral core at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was previously a consultant at Saegis Pharmaceuticals and an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine. He earned his doctorate in Biology from the University of Houston and did his post-doctoral training at the Baylor College of Medicine in the Department of Neuroscience. He has authored or co-authored over 70 research publications focused on neuropharmacology and the treatment of neurological diseases.

Dr. Li leads the design, implementation and execution of the precision medicine strategies, including diagnostics, to support various clinical development programs in Oncology at Bayer. She drives the delivery of the companion diagnostic assays leveraging interactions with Health Authorities to develop strategies with a global and local implementation. Since 2016, Dr. Li has led the cancer immunotherapy workstream to innovate biomarker & clinical diagnostic tests and driven the Foundation Medicine R&D collaboration at Genentech. She co-authored a patent on the application of the F1CDx panel for measurement of tumor mutation burden (TMB). She played a significant role to incorporate the new bTMB assay into the BFAST program, the first prospective trial that uses only liquid biopsy to select patients. Prior to Genentech, Dr. Li held roles of increasing responsibility at Roche Molecular Diagnostics where she notably championed the successful launch of the first FDA approved liquid biopsy CDx. She earned her PhD in Molecular Biology, Biochemistry & Biophysics at the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Professor Liang received his BS in Polymer Physics from USTC and PhD in Biomaterials from UIUC. He subsequently pursued his postdoctoral training on protein and materials chemistry with Professor Galen Stucky at UCSB. Liang is currently an Associate Professor at TTUHSC. He also serves as an Editorial Board Member for Scientific Reports. His research interest is in membrane biophysics and bioengineering, with a particular focus on understanding and controlling the recognition and transport across the nanoscale membrane boundaries. He is a co-inventor of zSMA and polymer nanodiscs, both of which can help support membrane proteins in well-defined proteomembrane platforms under a broad range of conditions.

Linda is a Principal Scientist at Merck’s Exploratory Science Center and has been with Merck for 3 years. Her work focuses on understanding epithelial biology in the context of inflammation and infection. To this end, her group utilizes physiologically relevant primary in vitro cultures. Linda received her PhD in Immunology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Lieu is the Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President at NGM. He is a seasoned drug developer with experience leading clinical development programs and executing integrated medical and commercial strategies across a spectrum of therapeutic areas. In both large pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, Dr. Lieu has led teams responsible for preclinical through Phase 3 development, as well as medical affairs. Prior to NGM, Dr. Lieu worked at Genentech as Vice President of Early Clinical Development for all non-oncology molecules. He also worked at Eli Lilly, where he held various leadership roles, including Global Brand Development Leader for Taltz®, Managing Director and Vice President at Lilly’s internal early clinical development and research division Chorus, Head of Global Clinical Pharmacology for diabetes, and Senior Medical Director of U.S. Medical Affairs for a number of cardiovascular and autoimmune products. Prior to joining Lilly, Dr. Lieu was a co-founder and CEO of RetinoRx, LLC and Chief Medical Officer/Executive Vice President at Niles Therapeutics, Inc. Earlier in his career, he held clinical development leadership roles with Portola Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and CV Therapeutics, Inc. (acquired by Gilead). Dr. Lieu was an attending cardiologist at San Francisco General Hospital from 2002-2013 and an adjunct Associate Clinical Medical Professor at University of California, San Francsico (UCSF). He completed his cardiology fellowship at UCSF, a postdoctoral research fellowship in molecular cardiology at the J. David Gladstone Research Institute at UCSF, and an internal medicine residency at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Dr. Lieu received his M.D. from Albert Einstein College of Medicine and BA from New York University.

Vice President, Research

Vice President, Research

Dr. Jing Liu is Executive Director of Medicinal Chemistry at Cullgen, a company dedicated to the development of novel approaches for targeted protein degradation and therapeutics for cancer and immune diseases. Dr. Liu is an experienced medicinal chemist with expertise in small-molecule drug discovery and protein degradation technologies. Prior to joining Cullgen, Dr. Liu was Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacological Sciences at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai where his research focused on discovering small-molecule inhibitors and/or degraders targeting kinases, epigenetic modulators and GPCRs, resulting in over 30 journal articles and over 15 issued patents and published patent applications.

Director, Antibody Engineering

Principal Project Advisor

Bin Ma is a senior scientist in the department of medicinal chemistry at Biogen. Bin received his BS and MS degree in chemistry from Lanzhou University and a PhD degree in organic chemistry from Boston University. Bin gained his postdoc training at Harvard University in Professor Kishi’s labs. In 2007, Bin moved to Biogen as a medicinal chemist and started his industrial career. Bin contributed multiple development candidates in multiple therapeutic areas at Biogen including BIIB068, gained extensive experience on target validation, hit ID, lead optimization, candidate selection and preclinical development, served as a leader for chemistry teams and project teams. Bin’s current efforts focus on the drug discovery for neurodegenerative diseases.

Dr. MacKinnon is an experienced pharmacologist with project management and strong research skills developed in both academic and commercial settings. She has her postdoctoral degree from the University of Edinburgh.

Director of Biology and scientific co-founder

Brent Martin received his Ph.D. in Pharmacology at the University of California in San Diego, working with Nobel Laureate Professor Roger Tsien, where he developed new chemical strategies for correlated fluorescence and electron microscopy. He then carried out postdoctoral studies with Professor Benjamin Cravatt at the Scripps Research Institute developing new strategies for activity-based profiling, high-throughput screening, and chemical proteomics. As faculty member at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, he continued expanding the scope of activity-based profiling methods, while also establishing new bioconjugation reactions to detect and profile protein lipidation, redox modifications, and cysteine occupancy. Brent is the recipient of the NCI Howard Temin K99/R00 award in Cancer Research, the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, and the NIGMS MIRA Established Investigator Award. As head of Chemical Biology at Janssen, Brent led efforts to apply chemical biology approaches to advance drug discovery and he is currently doing the same at Scorpion Therapeutics.

Matt is the head of Drug Discovery at Mirati Therapeutics, responsible for preclinical advancement of their KRAS portfolio as well as several other undisclosed targets. Prior to Mirati, Matt was the head of chemistry at Takeda California, with earlier roles at Pfizer, where he started his career and became head of the oncology chemistry group in their Groton, CT site.

Derek Mason worked as a process engineer in Denver, Colorado for 3 years before moving to Basel, Switzerland in 2015. After completing his PhD in the Laboratory for Systems and Synthetic Immunology at ETH Zurich’s Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, he is now co-founder of deepCDR Biologics, a novel antibody discovery and development company. Intrigued by advances in gene editing technologies and machine learning, his research interests aim towards combining cellular and protein engineering in mammalian cells with computational/bioinformatics analysis for the field of antibody discovery and development.

John McCarter is Head of Affinity Screening Technologies at Amgen where he leads a group focusing on the discovery and characterization of small molecule ligands by affinity mass spectrometry and other techniques. At Amgen John has overseen the execution of over 80 high throughput screens and provided quantitative biology support to more than 30 medicinal chemistry programs. Prior to joining Amgen in 2000, John was a Senior Scientist and Project Leader at Axys Pharmaceuticals where he contributed to the Cathepsin K program leading to the clinical development (partnered with Merck) of odanacatib for the treatment of osteoporosis. He was a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (formerly Medical Research Council of Canada) postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Jack Kirsch at the University of California, Berkeley and earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry studying mechanisms and inhibitors of glycosidases at the University of British Columbia with Prof. Stephen Withers.

Karyn McFadden is currently a Senior Scientist in the Therapeutic Discovery division of Amgen, Inc. She received her PhD from Drexel University researching HIV-1 entry inhibitors. She then went on to a Post-doctoral position at Duke University studying how Epstein-Barr Virus infection impacts B cell metabolism and proliferation early after infection. She joined Amgen in 2016 as part of a team that developed a single B cell antibody discovery process using the Berkeley Lights BeaconTM.

John McGee leads the De Novo Discovery group at FogPharma, where he and his team develop and implement ultra-high-throughput screening platforms to discover and optimize helical binders to undruggable target proteins.

Dr. Dustin McMinn is Senior Director and Head of Medicinal Chemistry at Kezar Life Sciences where he leads Kezar’s principal discovery program developing small molecule Sec61 inhibitors for treatment of cancer and autoimmune disorders. He joined Kezar at its inception having previously led the medicinal chemistry group at Onyx Pharmaceuticals. At Onyx, Dr. McMinn was project leader behind the discovery of the selective immunoproteasome inhbitor, KZR-616, now licensed to Kezar and in Phase 1/2 clinical studies for treatment of several autoimmune disorders. Prior to Onyx, Dr. McMinn served more than 10 years as a medicinal chemist at Amgen making contributions to several drug discovery programs aimed at protein-protein interactions, GPCR-like proteins, kinases and other drug targets to include Amgen’s MDM2 program culminating in AMG 232, presently in clinical trials. Dr. McMinn obtained his doctorate in organic chemistry at Colorado State University under the direction of Professor Marc M. Greenberg (now at Johns Hopkins University) and performed his postdoctoral research at the Scripps Research Institute with joint appointment to Professors Floyd Romesberg and Peter Schultz.

I received a PhD from the Department of Chemistry at Wayne State University in the laboratory of William Hase. There, I explored and developed methods to model intermolecular forces that drive molecular recognition and ensuing chemical reactions. As a postdoc, I joined the bioorganic laboratory of Dr. Shahriar Mobashery first at Wayne State University and then at the University of Notre Dame. I worked on understanding the mechanism by which ß-lactamases hydrolyze ß-lactam antibiotics. I was also involved in the development of mechanism-based (covalent) small-molecule inhibitors of matrix metalloproteinases, cathepsins, and ß-lactamases. In my lab at Indiana University, we develop small molecules to modulate the function of proteins involved in promoting tumor growth and metastasis. We are currently developing small-molecule modulators of protein interactions of Ras-like and Rho GTPases, the TEAD-Yap transcription factor complex, and the urokinase receptor uPAR. We investigate compounds and their targets in breast, pancreatic, lung and brain cancer cells and animal models. Some of these small molecules are used to probe their targets in spinal cord and traumatic brain injury as well as neurodegenerative diseases through collaborations. In addition to my funding from the National Institutes of Health, I am a recipient of a Research Scholar Award from the American Cancer Society. I am a member of the Department of Veterans Affairs, Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center, and the Stark Neurosciences Institute.

Dr. Mino-Kenudson is Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School and the Director of Pulmonary Pathology Service at Massachusetts General Hospital. She has been conducting translational research on lung cancer in collaboration with molecular pathologists, thoracic oncologists, and basic scientists. She and her team have described the morphology of molecularly annotated and/or biologically aggressive lung adenocarcinomas. They were the first group to report the signet ring cell morphology associated with ALK rearranged lung adenocarcinoma, as well as tumor islands, which associate with KRAS mutations and unfavorable patient outcomes, and are now considered to represent airspace invasion. They also documented the utility of clinical testing to identify molecularly defined lung adenocarcinomas. The ALK and ROS1 FISH as well as ALK immunohistochemistry (IHC: the clone D5F3) that they reported have significantly facilitated the detection of patients with actionable gene arrangements (game-changing innovations). She and her collaborators have also been actively investigating resistant mechanisms for EGFR, ALK, ROS1 and other tyrosin kinase inhibitors that will aid in identifying appropriate treatment for those patients after development of resistance to the inhibitors. More recently, Dr. Mino-Kenudson and her team have been studying and have reported predictive biomarkers for immune checkpoint blockade in non-small cell lung cancer. She is a member of the Pathology Panel of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) and co-chairs the biomarkers working group, the main goal of which is to improve biomarker testing for immunotherapy (including PD-L1 IHC) globally.

Scientific Consultant

No bio available.

No bio available.

Vish Muthusamy is a cancer biologist with expertise in the field of cancer genetics, epigenetics, immunobiology and pharmacology. In his early works, he has published several papers describing genetic alterations that lead to formation and progression of cancer. He has used these alterations to develop in vivo tumor models to better understand the disease. More recently, Dr. Muthusamy has worked in close collaboration with medicinal chemists and helped develop several therapeutic agents targeting cancer, infectious pathogens and immune disorders. Dr. Muthusamy's current interests lie in discovery and pharmacological development of anti-cancer drugs particularly, designing and carrying out preclinical studies and advancing candidate drugs to clinic. He has experience working in collaboration with big and small pharma companies towards drug development and as the Director of the Yale Center for Precision Cancer Modeling, he helps Yale investigators advance their candidate therapeutic agents towards approval for clinical application.

Behnam Nabet, Ph.D. is the Katherine Loker Pinard Fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Nathanael Gray at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Dr. Nabet received his Ph.D. in Cancer Biology from Northwestern University and B.A. in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania. In his postdoctoral research, Dr. Nabet developed a generalizable technology platform known as the dTAG system to rapidly degrade any target protein of interest. The dTAG system pairs potent small molecule degraders and extensible tagging strategies to achieve selective degradation of divergent proteins. This technology facilitates biological exploration and drug target validation in cells and animal models. Dr. Nabet is currently applying the dTAG platform to investigate pancreatic cancer dependencies and has been sharing the technology with the global scientific community in an open-source manner. Dr. Nabet is supported by an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellowship and is a recipient of the Claudia Adams Barr Program for Innovative Cancer Research award.

Dir Translational Imaging

Robert Neff is a Principal Scientist at Janssen R&D, LLC with a longstanding interest in ion channel pharmacology and over a decade of experience in neuroscience drug discovery. At Janssen, he has led both large and small molecule drug discovery efforts and is currently responsible for a cross-functional, geographically distributed project team focused on the delivery a novel antidepressant. Prior to joining Janssen, he obtained a PhD in Pharmacology from The George Washington University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Diego.

Dr. Kavitha Nellore obtained her PhD in Bioengineering from Pennsylvania State University, USA. During this time, she was a fellow of the Huck’s Institute of Life Sciences specializing in Biomolecular Transport Dynamics. She has been at Aurigene for more than 15 years and is currently heading the Cell and Molecular Biology Department. At Aurigene, she leads multiple drug discovery programs in the therapeutic areas of inflammation, oncology and immuno-oncology.

I joined the Lagier-Tourenne lab as a postdoctoral fellow at MGH and Harvard Medical School in October 2019. My main interest is in understanding the molecular mechanisms underpinning amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, with a focus on the role of RNA binding proteins in disease pathogenesis. We’re particularly interested in how a reduction in one RNA-binding protein at the nucleus, TDP-43, can lead to the reduction of another protein called STMN2 elsewhere in the cell. My project is based around understanding how we can manipulate STMN2 expression with a view to targeting it therapeutically. Prior to joining the Lagier-Tourenne lab I completed a PhD in Clinical Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, supervised by Dr. Olaf Ansorge. During my doctoral work I developed new ways of quantifying ALS pathology in the human brain to understand why some cells appear to be more susceptible to the protein aggregation associated with the disease than others. I did my undergraduate studies in Biomedical Science (BSc) at Nottingham Trent University and a masters degree (MSc) in Molecular Medicine at the University of Sheffield.

Dan Nomura is a professor in the Departments of Chemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology, and Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology at the University of California, Berkeley and an adjunct professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UCSF. He is also the director of the Novartis-Berkeley Center for Proteomics and Chemistry Technologies and an Investigator in the Innovative Genomics Institute. He earned his B.A. in Molecular and Cell Biology and Ph.D. in Molecular Toxicology at UC Berkeley with Professor John Casida and was a postdoctoral fellow at The Scripps Research Institute with Professor Ben Cravatt before returning to Berkeley as a faculty member in 2011. Among his honors are selection as a Searle Scholar, American Cancer Society Research Scholar Award, the Department of Defense Breakthroughs Award, and the Mark Foundation for Cancer Research ASPIRE award. The Nomura Research Group is focused on redefining druggability using chemoproteomic platforms to tackle the undruggable proteome.

Dr. Tatiana Novobrantseva is Co-Founder and CSO of Verseau Therapeutics. She previously served as Head of Research and Development. Before co-founding Verseau, she consulted for multiple companies on immunological aspects of drug development across different stages and therapeutic modalities in a variety of autoimmune, cancer and rare disease indications. At her prior position as Director of Tumor Immunology at Jounce Therapeutics, Tatiana defined research plans for several programs at the company’s inception, as well as led a portfolio of programs on (re)activating the immune system against cancer. Previously, Tatiana served as Associate Director at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals and Scientist II at Biogen. Tatiana’s scientific accomplishments include discovering the critical role for B cells in liver fibrosis, developing mechanistic insights for multiple therapeutic programs, pushing the envelope on siRNA delivery and championing a dendritic cell cancer vaccine clinical program. Tatiana is an inventor on more than 22 patents and an author on more than 37 peer-reviewed manuscripts. Tatiana completed her PhD with Dr. Klaus Rajewsky at the University of Cologne in Germany, focusing on B cell development and function. She holds a diploma of engineer-physicist and an MS in molecular biology from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

Senior Director, Global Pathology & Investigative Toxicology

No bio available.

Julien Orts studied Physics and Biophysics and graduated in 2010 jointly from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory under the guidance of Professor Carlogmano and Professor Griesinger. During that time, he developed the INPHARMA method that can experimentally assess, by NMR, the quality of docking poses of fragments in the receptor binding site using only unlabeled protein (ug) from cell extra. In 2010, Julien, joined the ETH in Zurich in the laboratory of Physical Chemistry. He was appointed in 2016 “oberassistent” and then group leader. He also develops methods for fast protein-ligand complex structures determination. He demonstrates for the first time that 3D structure determination of a protein-ligand complex can be achieved from solution NMR data fully automatically. He is currently investigating protein dynamics and allosteric communications within proteins and protein complexes.

Assistant Director

Fiona Pachl is a Senior Scientist at AstraZeneca, whose focus is on utilizing chemical biology and proteomics methods to investigate the selectivity and mechanism of small molecule protein degraders. Prior to joining AstraZeneca in 2017, she did a postdoctoral fellowship at Biogen and received her PhD from Technical University Munich, working in the lab of Prof. Dr. Bernhard Kuster.

Christina has been a core member of the Antibody Discovery team within Biologics Drug Discovery for over 10 years. She graduated from MIT with a BA in Chemical Engineering and a MA in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania. She has extensive experience working with phage and yeast display systems, including the Dyax and Adimab platforms. She has led numerous Antibody Discovery campaigns for a variety of targets, including therapeutic candidates for oncology, autoimmune disease, fibrosis, MS, and neurological indications.

Tadas is a Senior Principal Scientist leading phage display and molecular biology functions in Biotherapeutic Molecule Discovery at Boehringer Ingelheim. Before joining BI he worked at Alexion Pharmaceuticals for three years and led a group of scientists involved in antibody discovery, molecular biology, and protein expression. He was also a director of Alexion’s Postdoctoral Program. Prior to joining Alexion, Tadas spent seven years at Janssen Pharmaceuticals where he focused on different aspects of antibody discovery. During his earlier carrier at Lifesensors, Inc., Tadas concentrated on enhancing protein expression in mammalian, bacterial, and insect cell systems. Tadas co-authored over 30 peer reviewed publications. He holds a Ph.D. degree in biology from the University of Massachusetts and B.S. degree from Vilnius University.

Brenton Paolella is a Research Scientist in the Cancer Program of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he works in the Cancer Dependency Map as a member of the Target Discovery and Advancement laboratory. His work centers on using novel genome-scale methods to identify new vulnerabilities in cancer. Prior to his work at the Broad institute, Brenton received his Ph.D. in genetics from Dartmouth Medical School and did postdoctoral training at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Dr. Anthony Partridge is a Senior Principal Scientist at MSD Singapore where he leads programs in the early discovery space. Previously, he was Senior Director of Biology at Pharmaron Beijing where he led a team focused on assay development/validation, screening, and built a world-class compound management facility. As an In Vitro Pharmacology Capability Lead at Merck, he pioneered collaborative efforts with pharmacology-based CRO partners. Prior to this, he was a Senior Scientist in the Pharmacology group at Merck Montreal. Dr. Partridge began his industry based career at Élan Pharmaceuticals in San Francisco. He received his B.Sc. from the University of Guelph (1998), his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto (2003) and completed post-doctoral training at Scripps/UCSD (2003-2006).

After completing graduate studies in protein crystallography at Cambridge University, I joined Astex Pharmaceuticals to focus on the early development of small molecules using fragment-based drug discovery. I continued a hit identification focus at AstraZeneca both in the UK and Boston research hubs before joining C4 Therapeutics in 2016. I currently lead the Biochemistry, Biophysics and Crystallography team at C4T tasked with the in vitro evaluation of targeted protein degraders and structural and biophysical characterization to support medicinal chemistry design.

Noel Pauli is a Senior Scientist of Antibody Sciences at Adimab LLC. He joined Adimab in 2015. Working in Dr. Laura Walker’s group, their research focused on the generation of antibodies against integral membrane protein targets using murine immunization and single-B cell cloning. He received his PhD training from the University of Chicago under Patrick Wilson studying the human B cell response to Staphylococcus aureus infection at the resolution of monoclonal antibodies.

Dr. Petter is the Founder and CSO of Arrakis Therapeutics. Previously she was Vice President of Chemistry at Celgene, Vice President of Drug Discovery at Avila Therapeutics, Vice President of Research at Mersana Therapeutics, Director of Small Molecule Drug Discovery at Biogen, Section Head in Oncology Chemistry at Sandoz/Novartis, and Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Petter graduated from Dartmouth College with an AB in chemistry, earned her PhD in organic chemistry at Duke University with Ned Porter, and was a postdoctoral fellow in Ron Breslow’s group at Columbia University. She has ushered multiple compounds into the clinic for the treatment of cancer, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, and sepsis.

I have 10 years of experience in screening and identifying hits from DNA-encoded library (DEL) screens, and currently head the group responsible for affinity-based screening of GSK's DEL and aptamer collections.

Chief Data Officer

Mark R. Philips, MD is an internationally recognized expert in RAS biology and has published seminar work in this field in top tier journal including Cell, Science, Nature, Molecular Cell, Nature Cell Biology and PNAS. Dr. Philips has maintained NIH funding for 27 years. He has translated his basic discoveries into drug discovery programs. He is a recipient of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Award for Translational Research, the BioAccelerate NYC Prize, and the NCI Distinguished Investigator Award, and has been elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians and the Interurban Clinical Club. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has served as Director of the NYU Medical Scientist Training Program since 2011 and is Associate Director of the Perlmutter Cancer Center. He has trained more than 30 undergraduates, medical students, medical residents, graduate students, MD/PhD candidates and postdoctoral fellows, several of whom have become independent scientists on the faculties of NYU, Harvard Medical School, Columbia, UCSF, UPenn, University of Florida, and University of New Mexico.

Gary Piazza received a PhD in pharmacology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and postdoctoral training at Fox Chase Cancer Center and Brown University. Gary has a broad research background as a Staff Scientist with the Proctor and Gamble Company (1989-1994); Senior Director of Biology for Cell Pathways Inc. (1994-2001); Director of Pharmacology at the Institute for Drug Development (2001-2003); and at Southern Research where he served as PI on numerous grants and as director for a NIH Molecular Libraries Screening Center (2003-2011). Since 2011, Gary has held the appointments of Professor of Pharmacology and Chief of the Drug Discovery Research Center at USA Mitchell Cancer Institute. Gary’s research is focused on identifying novel molecular targets and small-molecule inhibitors for cancer. He has served as PI on many NIH/NCI R01 grants continuously since 2004. Gary is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. In 2014, Gary co-founded ADT Pharmaceuticals.

William C. K. Pomerantz received his BS in chemistry from Ithaca College in 2002, followed by a Fulbright Fellowship at ETH, Zurich with Professors François Diederich and Jack Dunitz. He obtained a PhD in chemistry under Professors Sam Gellman and Nick Abbott at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a postdoctoral fellow under Professor Anna Mapp at the University of Michigan. He joined the chemistry faculty at the University of Minnesota in 2012 and was granted tenure in 2018. He is currently a McKnight Presidential Fellow. His research focuses on the development of chemical biology and medicinal chemistry approaches for modulating protein-protein interactions. Protein-Observed Fluorine NMR (PrOF NMR) is one such tool in his lab that is being developed as a new method for fragment-based ligand discovery (FBLD) and has been applied towards inhibiting a diverse area of epigenetic protein complexes. Professor Pomerantz is currently the global council co-chair for the International Chemical Biology Society and Early Career Board Member for ACS Med. Chem. Lett.

Ryan Potts obtained his B.S. from the University of North Carolina and his Ph.D. from UT Southwestern. In 2008 he was awarded the Sara and Frank McKnight independent postdoctoral fellowship at UT Southwestern Medical Center. During this time his research focused on biochemically defining a novel family of proteins called MAGEs as regulators of E3 ubiquitin ligases. In 2011 he was appointed Assistant Professor in the department of Physiology at UT Southwestern Medical Center. In 2016 his lab moved to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital where he is an Associate Member in the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology. His lab worked on elucidating the functions of MAGE-RING Ligases. Recently he has moved to Amgen as Executive Director and Head of the Induced Proximity Platform.

Dr. Poyurovsky leads the Discovery Biology group at Kadmon, bridging early discovery studies and nonclinical development of small molecules and biologics, with emphasis on fibrosis and inflammation. She is the leading scientist on the ROCK inhibitor program and multiple other early stage discovery programs. Along with drug discovery efforts, Dr. Poyurovsky works closely with Kadmon’s Business Development team as a scientific liaison. She has authored numerous patents, papers and reviews, along with several book chapters on cellular metabolism and cancer. Prior to joining Kadmon 8 years ago, Dr. Poyurovsky spent more than ten years studying cellular and molecular mechanisms of cancer in an academic setting. Dr. Poyurovsky received her BS in biology from the University of Pittsburgh and her PhD in biochemistry from Columbia University. Dr. Poyurovsky continued her postgraduate work at Columbia, first as a postdoctoral fellow and then independently, as a staff scientist.

John Quinn is a Principal Scientist leading a biophysical group in Biochemical and Cellular Pharmacology at Genentech supporting SMDD pipeline projects and is particularly interested in the practical exploitation of kinetics for applications that are of value in preclinical SMDD. He received a PhD in Applied Immunology and Biochemistry from Dublin City University (DCU) and after a postdoc position developing biosensors at DCU, he joined Texas Instruments, Dallas, TX working on the development of SPR devices. This technology was later licensed to Nomadics Inc., and he joined them to head the development and commercialization of the SensiQ Pioneer as CSO. His interests in drug discovery led him to take a Principal Scientist position at Takeda California leading a biophysical group where his group supports both LM and SM projects.

Christoph Rader studied biochemistry in Germany and Switzerland where he received his PhD from the University of Zurich in 1995. Following postdoctoral training at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in La Jolla, CA, he was appointed Assistant Professor at TSRI in 1999. In 2003, he was recruited as Senior Scientist to the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. He rejoined TSRI in Jupiter, FL as Associate Professor with Tenure in 2012 and was promoted to Professor in 2019. In 2018, he was appointed as Associate Dean of the Skaggs Graduate School of Chemical and Biological Studies at TSRI, a top ten PhD program in chemistry, biochemistry, and biology. His laboratory has focused on antibody drug and target discovery for cancer therapy including the utilization of phage display for antibody generation, affinity maturation, and humanization, and for antigen discovery. Several antibodies developed in the Rader laboratory have reached preclinical and clinical investigations. Christoph Rader has authored >100 peer-reviewed journal articles and is named inventor on >25 issued and pending patent families.

Deepak Rajpal serves as head of bioinformatics, at Sanofi, delivering translational sciences research to therapeutic areas on target identification and validation, building and progressing drug discovery pipeline, biomarker discovery and patient selection. Prior to Sanofi, at GSK, over the past 17 years, assumed increasing responsibilities by delivering on various aspects of drug discovery and development in multiple therapy areas. Served as domain expert of computational biology for various metabolic and immune-mediated dermatological conditions. Provided strategic research partnership in building drug discovery units and established external collaborations to bring in innovative research ideas.

Dr. Murali Ramachandra is the CEO at Aurigene Discovery Technologies Limited, a biotech company engaged in drug discovery for cancer and inflammatory diseases. He received his PhD from University of Idaho (USA), and postdoctoral training from University of Kansas Medical Center and DuPont Experimental Station. Prior to his current role, he has held the position of the Chief Scientific Officer at Aurigene, and positions of increasing responsibility at Schering-Plough Pharmaceuticals and US National Cancer Institute. He has contributed to the identification of 16 novel drug candidates, co-authored 60 publications in international peer-reviewed journals and is an inventor of 18 granted US patents.

Arvind Rao is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan. His group uses image analysis and machine learning methods to link image-derived phenotypes with genetic data, across biological scale (i.e. single cell, tissue and radiology data). Such methods have found application in radiogenomics and drug repurposing based on phenotypic screens. Arvind received his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Bioinformatics from the University of Michigan, specializing in transcriptional genomics, and was a Lane Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, specializing in bioimage informatics.

I am a Principal Scientist at Pfizer Groton, CT. I received my MSc degree in Chemical Engineering from Imperial College-University of London and PhD in Natural Products and Organic Synthesis from University of Hawaii at Manoa (2003). I received academic and industrial postdoctoral training from University of Utah and Wyeth Research, respectively. I worked in natural products and medicinal chemistry-based programs for about 4 years before entering the antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) field in 2010. In 2017, I moved to the DNA-Encoded Library Technology (DELT) group where I currently work on validating on-DNA chemistries and developing and optimizing analytical methods for monitoring on-DNA chemical transformations.

Hasane Ratni is currently an Expert Scientist, Medicinal Chemistry, at F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd., pRED, Pharma Research & Early Development, Roche Innovation Center Basel, Switzerland. He received his PhD at the University of Geneva and did a post-doc at Tokyo before joining F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd in 2001. His research has mainly been devoted to the areas of neuroscience (for example neurokinin receptors, or V1a receptor antagonist now in human clinical trials, phase II, for autism). In 2005, he participated in a secondment within the Roche group at Chugai Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd, Gotemba Japan, in the field of renal disease. He was the chemistry discovery project leader of the SMN program aiming for a treatment for spinal muscular atrophy, now undergoing clinical trials in patients. His current focus is on gamma secretase modulator for Alzheimer disease. He is an author or co-author of more than 100 patents and publications. In 2014, he received the Roche Leo Sternbach Award for Innovation in Chemistry, in 2016 the Gold medal at the Roche Patent Inventor’s recognition event and in 2020 the Senior Industrial Award from the Swiss Chemical Society.

Paul is a noted research scientist and biotechnology executive with strong strategic and leadership experience. His industry expertise covers bench to IND and clinical trial development of biologics, small molecules and cellular therapeutics. In 2016 he co-founded Aleta Biotherapeutics, a CAR T cell company targeting solid tumors and hematologic malignancies, with and a strong pipeline and two programs currently in development.

Having received training in chemistry and pharmaceutical sciences during his graduate studies at the University of Goettingen, Germany, and at the Medical University of South Carolina, Uwe joined the group of Dr. Giulio Superti-Furga, one of the global leaders in functional proteomics, at Cellzome and later at the Center for Molecular Medicine in Vienna, Austria. During his postdoctoral studies, he specialized in chemical proteomics, a postgenomic, mass spectrometry-based adaptation of drug affinity chromatography that allows for the cell-specific characterization of drug-protein interactions. He characterized the protein target profiles of the paradigmatic tyrosine kinase inhibitors imatinib, dasatinib and several other kinase inhibitors in cancer cell lines and patient cells. Building on this core expertise, he combined this technology with cell-based drug screening and complementary proteomics, such as phosphoproteomics, and genomics methods to identify the complex molecular mechanisms of various drugs in leukemia, Ewing’s sarcoma and lung cancer and derived novel rational drug combination approaches with enhanced anticancer potential. At Moffitt, he is applying systems chemical biology approaches to identify novel avenues for targeting cancer based on single targeted agents and drug combinations, which may overcome primary and adaptive resistance and several of which have been translated into clinical trials.

Janice L. Robertson received her H.B.Sc. from the University of Toronto in Theoretical Physiology and Mathematics. She then carried out her PhD research with Dr. Benoît Roux and Dr. Larry Palmer at the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences, developing computational models of ion channels. For her postdoctoral training, she studied with Dr. Christopher Miller at HHMI/Brandeis University, diving into experimental studies of membrane protein transporter structure and function. In 2013, she started her independent laboratory in the Dept. of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Iowa, and recently moved to the Dept. Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Washington University in St. Louis in 2018. Her laboratory studies the physical driving forces underlying equilibrium reactions of membrane protein assemblies in membranes, by integrating membrane protein biochemistry, structure determination, single-molecule microscopy and computational modeling.

Associate Professor

As a trained biochemist, my main function within the Structural Biology has been to deliver high quality proteins for drug discovery applications (assay, immunization campaign or structural studies). After working for many years on soluble targets using crystallography, I have been more recently focused on the structural biology of membrane proteins: in order to enable these high value targets for structure-based drug design, I have been using cryo-EM. In parallel, I have also been interested in understanding the function and activation mechanism of these channels using modulators such as agonists.

Joe Rucker is the Vice President of Research & Development, a co-founder of Integral Molecular and an inventor of Integral Molecular’s founding Lipoparticle technology. Since joining the company, he has led the development of new applications for Lipoparticle technology, including its use in generating novel antibodies against membrane proteins. Dr. Rucker earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and completed postdoctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Application Scientist

Gopal is a tenured programme leader at the MRC Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit at Dundee University. Originally from Nepal, Gopal obtained a Masters in Biochemistry degree from University of Bath in 1999 and Ph.D. in Biochemistry from University of Dundee in 2003. He received the prestigious Damon Runyon Cancer Research Fellowship to undertake postdoctoral research in Joan Massagué’s laboratory at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. His research group studies the molecular mechanisms that underpin cellular signal transduction pathways, in particular through reversible protein ubiquitylation and phosphorylation processes, and their interplay, in human cells and diseases. His lab is involved in developing innovative technologies that harness the ubiquitin proteasome system to enable targeted protein degradation in cells that allow one to interrogate fundamental research questions and help expedite drug discovery.

No bio available.

Chief Scientific Officer, Biopharma

Tomi is Founding Chief Drug Hunter and President of Maestro Therapeutics, an emerging R&D enterprise dedicated to transforming and accelerating peptide modality therapeutics. Most recently, Tomi was a Distinguished Scientist, Global Chemistry at Merck & Company where he led a Peptide Drug Hunter Network. Prior to joining Merck & Company in 2014, Tomi was the Founding Chief Scientific Officer at Aileron Therapeutics from 2007 to 2013 and Senior Vice President of Drug Discovery at Ariad Pharmaceuticals (recently acquired by Takeda for $5.2B) from 1997 to 2006. He is credited with building a stapled peptide technology platform at Aileron Therapeutics as well as driving a $1.1B strategic R&D collaboration with Roche Pharma. He is a peptide, peptidomimetic, de novo nonpeptide, small molecule and natural product drug hunter and has contributed to the discovery of three marketed drugs (Scenesse®, Iclusig® and Ridaforolimus), a Phase II clinical candidate (ALRN-6924) and preclinical development of renin inhibitors, HIV protease inhibitors, Src SH2 antagonists, and dual Src/Bcr-Abl kinase inhibitor. Tomi is credited with >600 scientific publications, patents, and presentations. He holds Adjunct Professorship and/or Scientific Advisory Board appointments at the University of Massachusetts, the University of Arizona and Northeastern University Center for Drug Discovery.

No bio available.

Dr. Gottfried Schroeder joined the Biochemistry and Biophysics group at MSD (Boston, MA) in 2012. Since that time Gottfried has applied a wide range of biophysical techniques coupled with automation to projects in multiple disease areas from the early discovery through preclinical candidate space. These efforts encompassed small-scale screening to in-depth mechanism of action studies, including several clinical assets. In 2015, Gottfried assumed a leadership role in surface plasmon resonance (SPR) at the Boston site providing continued support for multiple preclinical and clinical programs spanning small molecule, peptide, and oligonucleotide modalities. Dr. Schroeder received his doctorate (UNC-Chapel Hill) under Richard Wolfenden with a focus on enzymology and biophysics. His postdoctoral work at UT-Austin with Chris Whitman and Kenneth Johnson (collaboration) centered on advanced transient state kinetics methods and enzyme mechanism. Gottfried’s current interests include further integration and application of SPR data to the drug discovery process.

Alwin has ~20 years' industry experience mentoring diverse research teams and providing in vivo pharmacology and biology strategy to various small molecule and antibody projects ranging from target validation through clinical development. The past ~7 years he has held various roles in the in vivo pharmacology group of AstraZeneca including bioscience lead of the Arginase and A2AR programs.

Rishi completed an integrated Master's degree at Queen Mary, University of London, before a brief stint at a spin-out of University College London. Rishi then joined GSK as medicinal chemist and subsequently completed his doctorate in protein degradation on the GSK-University of Strathclyde collaborative industrial PhD scheme, under the tutelage of Dr Diane Coe, Dr Joanna Redmond and Prof John Murphy. Rishi is currently a Senior Scientist at GSK and has a broad range of experience working on a range of different target classes, and various chemical modalities. Rishi’s current research is focussed on the design and development of PROTACs

No bio available.

CEO

Director, Business Development

Meredith Skiba received her Bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Bryn Mawr College. She completed her PhD in biological chemistry at the University of Michigan under the advisement of Dr. Janet Smith. Meredith was awarded a ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award for her thesis work, which focused on the structural enzymology of natural product biosynthesis. She is currently a Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Andrew Kruse’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School.

Rob Slack is currently Director of Pharmacology at Galecto, Inc. in London, UK where he oversees the company’s research activities. Prior to joining Galecto, Rob served as Head of Translational Pharmacology within the Respiratory Therapy Area at GlaxoSmithKline where he led a number of inhaled and oral programmes through lead optimisation to clinical studies in fibrotic and inflammatory diseases during his 17 years at the company. Rob received his BSc and MSc from the University of Bath, UK and his PhD from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology. His research has included a focus on the translational pharmacological characterisation of av integrins, GPCRs and galectins in the context of lead optimisation and drug discovery for fibrotic and inflammatory diseases.

Yochi Slonim is a serial entrepreneur with a track record of over 30 years in software and biotech. As a Co-founder and CEO, he is driving the company's vision and strategy, fundraising, and partnering. Prior to Anima, Yochi has built several companies from their early stage, through all stages of product development, marketing, and sales and eventually turned them into successful large exits. He was a co-founder of Mercury Interactive. As CTO and VP R&D from the company's early days, he created product vision and strategy and led a multi-product organization of 200 developers. After going public and reaching revenues of over $1B annually, Mercury was acquired by HP for $4.5B. As Senior VP of products and marketing for Tecnomatix, a public NASDAQ company, he led a 500 people organization of 4 divisions that generated revenues of $100m until the company was acquired by UGS for $230m. In 2000, Yochi was founder and CEO of Identify. The company reached revenues of $50m in less than 5 years and was acquired by BMC in 2006 for $150m in cash. Yochi founded ffwd.me, a unique startup acceleration program where he led a team that worked with over 25 startups in diverse areas and technologies, developing strategy, products and go to market operations while raising multiple rounds of financing from VCs and private investors.

Martine Smit obtained her PhD in Molecular Pharmacology at the VU University Amsterdam. After a post-doc at Mount Sinai School of Medicine (NY) on oncogenic signaling networks, she established a new research line on human and viral chemokine receptors at the VU University Amsterdam. Her research focuses at understanding and targeting of (oncogenic) signaling networks activated by human and viral chemokine receptors using nanobodies.

Director of New Business Development

Scientist

Alexander Statsyuk is an assistant professor at the University of Houston College of Pharmacy. He obtained his PhD degree at the University of Chicago in 2006, where he synthesized natural product Bistramide A and established its mode of action in cells. He then completed his postdoctoral work at UCSF, where he was working on the development of chemical cross-linkers to identify upstream kinases of protein phosphorylation sites. Since 2010 he has been running his independent research program aimed at discovering drug leads targeting degradation pathways such as ubiquitin-proteasome system and autophagy. He is an author of 32 manuscripts, he filed 10 patent applications, and he is a recipient of Pew Scholar Award. Some of the technologies that he and his group have developed and patented include covalent fragments, novel probes UbFluor to conduct HTS screens to discover E3 ligase inhibitors, activators, and hijackers, and E3-Substrate cross-linkers useful to study E3-Substrate interactions in vitro and to validate E3-Substrate hijackers in vitro.

Dr. William Strohl is founder and owner of BiStro Biotech Consulting LLC, started in 2016 to help biotechnology companies grow and expand their capabilities. Prior to retiring from Johnson & Johnson in 2016, Dr. Strohl was VP and Head, Janssen BioTherapeutics, Janssen R&D, J&J, where he headed up biologics discovery and early development. Before that, Dr. Strohl was head of Biologics Research at J&J. Dr. Strohl and his teams placed more than 30 highly innovative therapeutic proteins into development. Before joining J&J, Dr. Strohl was at Merck and Co from 1997-2008, leading Natural Products Biology, and then later, leading the Biologics discovery efforts, where he was involved in two biotechnology company acquisitions. Dr. Strohl started his career rising from Assistant to Full Professor, Department of Microbiology and Program of Biochemistry, at The Ohio State University, from 1980-1997. Dr. Strohl has over 140 publications and 17 issued patents, has edited three books, and wrote a book entitled "Therapeutic Antibody Engineering: Current and Future Advances Driving the Strongest Growth Area in the Pharma Industry" (2012).

Jinpeng Sun, Professor and Chair of Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in Shandong University, School of Medicine; Professor at Department of Physiology, Peking University. Professor Sun focused on investigation of GPCR functions and ligands, dissecting the mechanism underlying GPCR functions and developing specific approaches targeting to GPCRs to treat human diseases. He had published more than 70 papers in academic journals including “Nat. Chem. Biol, Nature Medicine, Biol Psychiatry, Nat Commun, PNAS, and eLife etc”, which were cited by more than 3000 times. Many of his publications were highlighted by specific commentary or recommended by Faculty 1000.

Chaohong Sun is a Research Fellow and Director in Discovery Research organization at Abbvie, where she leads the small molecule Protein Sciences group and also heads up the lead discovery strategy team that is responsible to set and execute integrated lead generation strategies (including fragment-based approach, DEL and HTS) for Abbvie’s early portfolio targets. She received her Ph.D. from Dartmouth College in biophysical chemistry and then joined Abbott as a postdoctoral research fellow to study structures and functions of proteins involved in apoptosis pathway before becoming a staff scientist. She is coauthor of over 50 peer reviewed scientific publications and patents.

Susanne Swalley, Ph.D. leads a chemical biology laboratory as a Principal Scientist at Biogen. Trained as a chemist, her current research focuses on developing and applying methodologies for target deconvolution of small molecule hits from phenotypic screens, particularly genome-wide CRISPR/Cas9 screening and chemoproteomics. Prior to Biogen, she was a Senior Investigator at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research where she focused on target identification and validation using biophysical approaches, and a Research Scientist at Vertex Pharmaceuticals where she contributed to the evaluation and screening of new targets. Susanne graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College with bachelor’s degrees in chemistry and music, and she obtained a Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology with Dr. Peter Dervan. Her postdoctoral training was at Harvard University in the laboratories of Dr. Don Wiley and Dr. Stephen Harrison.

Dan Tagle is associate director for special initiatives at NCATS. He also recently served as acting director of the NCATS Office of Grants Management and Scientific Review and as executive secretary to the NCATS Advisory Council and Cures Acceleration Network Review Board. Prior to joining NCATS, Tagle was a program director for neurogenetics at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), where he was involved in developing programs concerning genomics-based approaches for basic and translational research in inherited brain disorders. Prior to joining NINDS in 2001, Tagle was an investigator and section head of molecular neurogenetics at the National Human Genome Research Institute and has been involved in the highly collaborative effort toward the positional cloning of genes for Huntington’s disease, ataxia-telangiectasia and Niemann-Pick disease type C. Tagle obtained his Ph.D. in molecular biology and genetics from Wayne State University School of Medicine in 1990. He was an NIH National Research Service Award postdoctoral fellow in human genetics in the laboratory of Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., at the University of Michigan. Tagle has authored more than 150 scientific publications and has garnered numerous awards and patents.

Rebecca Taub, MD has served as Chief Medical Officer and Executive Vice President, Research & Development, and as a member of Madrigal’s Board of Directors, since July 2016. Previously, Dr. Taub served as Chief Executive Officer and as a member of the Board of Directors of privately-held Madrigal Pharmaceuticals, Inc. from inception through its merger with Synta Pharmaceuticals Corp. Prior to joining Madrigal, Dr. Taub served as Senior Vice President, Research and Development of VIA Pharmaceuticals from 2008 to 2011 and as Vice President, Research, Metabolic Diseases at Hoffmann-La Roche from 2004 to 2008. In those positions, Dr. Taub oversaw clinical development and drug discovery programs in cardiovascular and metabolic diseases including the conduct of a series of Phase I and II proof of conduct clinical trials. Dr. Taub led drug discovery including target identification, lead optimization and advancement of preclinical candidates into clinical development. From 2000 through 2003, Dr. Taub worked at Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and DuPont Pharmaceutical Company, in a variety of positions, including Executive Director of CNS and metabolic diseases research. Before becoming a pharmaceutical executive, Dr. Taub was a tenured Professor of Genetics and Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Taub is the author of more than 120 research articles. Before joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Taub served as an Assistant Professor at the Joslin Diabetes Center of Harvard Medical School, Harvard University and an associate investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Taub received her MD from Yale University School of Medicine and BA from Yale College.

At AbbVie, as a member of Global Protein Sciences, I work to ensure project teams are reagent enabled. During my academic training, my work focused on using biophysical and structural biology approaches to understand molecular mechanism. My postdoctoral studies were completed at Vanderbilt University in the laboratory of Dr. Charles Sanders, where I determined the KCNQ1 potassium channel voltage-sensor domain structure by solution NMR, providing insight into the conformational transitions that occur during channel activation (https://elifesciences.org/articles/53901). As a graduate student I trained in the laboratory of Dr. Ivan Rayment at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where I used crystallography to gain an understanding of how sarcomeric myosin assembles into bipolar filaments (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1505813112).

Andrea received his PhD from the University of Aberdeen (Scotland, UK) in 2015 in the field of molecular imaging under the supervision of Prof. Matteo Zanda. He then joined professor Alessio Ciulli’s group at the University of Dundee (Scotland, UK) where he started working on targeted protein degradation, focusing on structure based PROTAC design. He was part of the scientific team who laid the foundation of Amphsita Therapeutics and since 2019 he is Head of Chemistry of the company.

Elizabeth Thompson, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Pathology and Oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She received her B.S. from the College of William and Mary and went on to graduate from the Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of Virginia. There Dr. Thompson received her MD and PhD degrees in Microbiology and Immunology, completing her graduate thesis work studying the development of CD8+ T cell responses to melanoma, focusing on the activation and migration of T cells to the tumor microenvironment. She then completed residency training in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Dr. Thompson currently practices general surgical pathology at Johns Hopkins with a focus on pancreatic pathology. She is an associate member of the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy and her ongoing research focuses on the tumor immune microenvironment of pancreatic malignancies.

Deputy Research Director

Accomplished Molecular Modeler with extensive experience in Drug Discovery. Primary strengths in Computer-Aided Drug Design – both structure-based and ligand-based – as well as data mining and analysis. Inspiring leader, sought mentor & coach, fun team player, and extremely creative co-inventor with proven results across various top 10 pharmaceutical companies – Merck, Abbott, AbbVie. Dynamic international speaker and presenter in numerous scientific conferences across the globe. Co-author of more than 80 peer-reviewed scientific articles; two book chapters.

No bio available.

Scott Turner, PhD is a leader in fibrosis research and the development of novel transnational tools for drug discovery and development. Prior to joining Pliant as senior director of technology in 2016, Dr. Turner was the vice president of research and development at KineMed Inc. where he led the technology development and biomarker discovery efforts in fibrosis, atherosclerosis and metabolic disease. He has co-authored more than 50 publications and holds several patents in the areas of metabolic fluxes and stable isotopes methods. Dr. Turner has been awarded three NIH grants to fund his research into novel in vivo biomarker discovery. Dr. Turner received his PhD in 2002 in Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology from the University of California at Berkeley. His graduate research focused on the development and application of stable isotope methodology to the study of adipose tissue dynamics in the ob/ob mouse.

I got my Bachelor’s in Chemistry and Philosophy at Creighton University in Omaha working in synthetic organic chemistry. I then went to the University of Minnesota, where I received my Ph.D. working under Will Pomerantz developing protein-observed fluorine NMR as a ligand discovery technique. Since then I’ve been working in the high-throughput protein engineering group at AbbVie Bioresearch Center to design, produce, and analyze proteins in high-throughput.

I obtained my PhD at University of Tartu, Estonia in biomedical technology where my research focus was on human papillomavirus genome replication and the development of a high-throughput antiviral screening platform. After my PhD studies in molecular virology, I joined Icosagen as a scientist for therapeutic antibody development. In 2017 I joined Dr. Sachdev Sidhu at the University of Toronto where we have focused on establishing a robust engineered virus-like-particle based antigen display system for developing synthetic antibodies against difficult to express proteins – GPCRs, ion-channels and transporters.

I am currently a Sr Res Scientist I in the Fibrosis Biology group at Gilead Sciences. I joined Gilead in 2018 after a post doc in Dr. Barbara Kahn's lab at Beth Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, studying the role of adipose tissue de novo lipogenesis in maintaining metabolic homeostasis. I currently support the NASH clinical program at Gilead while also working on some early Discovery projects.

Robert received his PhD in Biochemistry from the Leiden University Center on a molecular study of oncogenic transformation. He continued his scientific career as Postdoc at Stanford University (USA). Upon his return to the Netherlands, he joined the group of Hans Clevers at the Hubrecht Institute studying adult stem cells. In the group of Hans Clevers, he was part of the team that developed the ground-breaking technology that allowed the expansion of adult stem cells in vitro. The so-called Organoid Technology became the basis of the company Hubrecht Organoid Technology (HUB), of which he is currently the CEO.

Domagoj Vucic, PhD, is a Staff Scientist and a Project Team Leader at Genentech in South San Francisco, USA. He obtained a BS from the University of Zagreb, Croatia, and a PhD from the University of Georgia, USA. He completed postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Vishva Dixit. Domagoj’s laboratory investigates the biological role of modulators of signaling pathways, and their involvement in cellular processes triggered by TNF family ligands and other pro-inflammatory stimuli. At Genentech, he leads an effort to develop compounds that target select kinases and ubiquitin ligases for blocking uncontrolled inflammatory responses and/or enhancement of the survival of damaged cells and tissues.

Dr. Changning Wang is an Assistant Professor of Radiology, at Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He is trained with a broad background in chemistry, pharmaceutical sciences and neuroscience, specialized in conducting research in developing and applying novel imaging probes for preclinical and clinical application for neuroimaging to investigate the human disease mechanism. Dr. Wang has developed several novel PET imaging probes for brain research, and some of them have been used in human, including [11C]Martinostat for HDACs, [11C]CW22 for bromodomains, [11C]CWL-1 for sirtuin 1, [18F]CNY-05 for sigma 1 receptor. These probes are under evaluation in neurodegenerative disease, drug addictions and cancer.

Dr. Shaomeng Wang obtained his chemistry B.S. degree from Peking University in 1986 and his PhD in Chemistry from Case Western Reserve University in 1992 and did his postdoctoral training at NIH. Dr. Wang is currently the Warner-Lambert/Parke Davis Professor in Medicine in the University of Michigan Medical School and professor of medicine, pharmacology and medicinal chemistry. Dr. Wang is the Director of University of Michigan Center for Therapeutic Innovation. Dr. Wang has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, American Chemical Society since 2012. Dr. Wang has co-founded 5 biotech companies to develop novel small-molecule drugs invented from his laboratory and has advanced 7 compounds into clinical development. Dr. Wang has published >300 peer-reviewed papers and is an inventor of 55 issued US patents and hundreds of international patents. Dr. Wang was elected as Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2014, Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2019 and was inducted into the Fall of Fame of the Division of Medicinal Chemistry of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in 2020. Dr. Wang was the 2014 University of Michigan Distinguished Innovator and won the 2020 Division of Medicinal Chemistry Award of ACS.

Postdoctoral Fellow

No bio available.

I am a project lead scientist within a multi-disciplinary PROTAC drug discovery team in a collaboration between Professor Alessio Ciulli of the University of Dundee and Boehringer Ingelheim.

Dr. Windsor has served as President and CEO of Lung Therapeutics since July of 2013. He has spent the last 20 years in the formation and management of life science companies, and has led technology development and licensing to major pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Dr. Windsor brings leadership experience in pharmaceutical drug development, and he previously served as President of Enavail, LLC, a specialty pharmaceutical manufacturing company developing unique formulations for superior drug performance. While at Enavail, Dr. Windsor oversaw all aspects of pharmaceutical drug development, including drug selection, regulatory strategy, preclinical and clinical strategy, GMP manufacturing, and strategic partnering for pharma products. Prior to his role with Enavail, Dr. Windsor directed portfolio company management for Emergent Technologies Inc. (ETI), an early-stage technology venture creation and management company. During his tenure at ETI, Dr. Windsor has served as Managing Director or President for ten of ETI’s portfolio companies and has been involved in the conception, technology licensing, corporate and technical strategic planning, launch, and business development of all of these ventures. Applications areas of these companies span diverse segments within life and material sciences and include pharmaceutical development and manufacturing, drug delivery, and biotechnology. Prior to joining ETI, he was Founder and Vice President of R&D for Texagen, Inc., a startup focused on genetic and chemical methods for overcoming mechanisms of drug resistance important to medicine and agriculture. At Texagen he directed outsourced research efforts at university labs and third-party contract research companies, and he interfaced with corporate partners interested in feasibility studies and in-licensing discussions. He holds a PhD in Molecular Biology from The University of Texas at Austin, and is an inventor on multiple patents and patent applications.

Dr. Huixian Wu received her PhD in Structural Biology and Chemistry from the Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla, CA) in the laboratory of Prof. Raymond C. Stevens. While in Stevens lab, Dr. Wu focused on G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) crystallography where she determined the crystal structures of several important human GPCRs, including the k-opioid receptor, metabotropic glutamate receptor, and smoothened receptor. After completing her PhD, Dr. Wu joined Prof. Stuart L. Schreiber’s laboratory in the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT (Cambridge, MA) for postdoctoral research, working on structure-based drug development (SBDD) targeting inflammatory bowel diseases. Currently, Dr. Wu is a Principal Scientist leading a Crystallography lab at Pfizer (Groton, CT). Her lab is supporting SBDD of diverse therapeutic targets across multiple disease areas in Pfizer.

VP Bus Dev

Application Scientist

Dr. Bing XIA received his BS in chemistry from the Lanzhou University (China). He completed his PhD graduate work at the Boston University with the widely recognized photochemist, Guilford Jones (pathogen detection, dipolar [3+2] photocycloadditions via ESIPT in collaboration with Professor John Porco, natural product total synthesis, and charge transfer in biomimetic and bioinspired systems). In 2008, Bing joined Encoded Library Technologies (ELTs) at GSK where he has played a key role in a variety of projects, IDO1 and PDE12 for example, across wide range of therapeutic areas. Bing then focused on development of on-DNA chemistry, design and synthesis of on-DNA library, and High-Throughput Binder Confirmation (HTBC). Meanwhile, Bing coinvented a novel cleavable linker for HTBC, which solved critical tech challenges and met urgent business needs. While with GSK, Bing has already won 3 Exceptional Science Awards, 2 Cool Chemistry Finalists, 5 Silver awards and numerous Bronze Awards. Bing published about 20 articles and patents in various fields in esteemed journals, such as Nature Comm., JACS, J. Med. Chem., Organic Letters, J. Clinical Microbiology, J. Biological Chemistry and J. Physical Chemistry.

Originally from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, I graduated with combined MS/BS degrees in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University. Alanna Schepartz was my thesis advisor, and her generosity in letting me stay on for a post-graduate year to continue my projects developing and using tools to study protein folding and DNA-binding proteins played a significant part in my interest in bio-organic chemistry. I earned my doctorate in Bio-Organic Chemistry with Peter G. Schultz at the University of California-Berkeley, where I studied the structure, function, and immunological evolution of catalytic antibodies. The challenge of making antibodies into catalysts forced me to become a good bench experimentalist but also generated a desire to characterize natural phenomena in biological systems. Consequently, for my post-doctoral training, I moved to the research group of Francis V. Chisari at The Scripps Research Institute where I began studying hepatitis B virus and hepatitis C virus and in particular focused on engineering model systems for studying these two fascinating viral pathogens. In my own research group here at Harvard Medical School, we develop and apply chemical tools in order to understand the interactions between the host and virus that are responsible for productive replication. My own mentors were generous and inspiring, and I am doing my best to give my own students and post-doctoral fellows the same sense that the only limit on their science is their own imagination. Aside from science, I enjoy hiking and running, good novels, great food, and traveling with my family.

Principal Scientist

Anna Yarilina is a Principal Scientist in Biologics Drug Biology Group at AbbVie Bioresearch Center in Worcester, MA. She joined Abbott/AbbVie in 2012 to elucidate the mechanism of action for TNF targeting biologics. Currently, she is leading and supporting discovery of biologics for metabolic and age-related diseases. As a member of the Biologics Generation Request Team, Anna is reviewing the screening funnel strategies. Anna’s training is in rheumatology and immunology with focus on the role of TNF in pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis. She received her MD from Russian State Medical University, completed her postdoctoral training at Weill Medical College of Cornell University and studied the role of myeloid cells in rheumatoid arthritis at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York.

As co-founder of Blue and co-inventor of our core technology, Ajay directs scientific and experimental efforts at Blue. He has over 15 years of research experience in opioid medicinal chemistry and the neurobiology of pain. Ajay completed his doctoral studies in the lab of Dr. Philip Portoghese at the University of Minnesota. Ajay completed his postdoctoral training under renowned pain neurobiologist Clifford Woolf at Harvard Medical School. He has authored several papers published in high-impact, peer-reviewed journals on the topic of pain and opioids, including several book chapters and invited reviews. He is also a recipient of the Bacaner Research Award from the Minnesota Medical Foundation.

Guido Zaman is Managing Director & Head of Biology of NTRC (Netherlands Translational Research Center B.V.), which he co-founded in 2011. NTRC has developed several small molecule compounds until clinical candidate for protein kinases and immune oncology targets. Using the technology platforms NTRC has developed to support these internal drug discovery programs, NTRC Services provides fee-for-services to pharma and biotech companies worldwide on cancer cell line profiling, synergy studies, bioinformatics and target residence time measurements for protein kinases. Prior to NTRC, Guido Zaman worked at MSD/Organon in Oss in diverse roles on drug discovery programs on protein kinases and receptor targets for immunology, oncology and women's health. Before moving to industry, Guido worked for five years at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam. He has a PhD in Science from Radboud University Nijmegen. Guido is an inventor on seven patents and co-author of more than eighty publications in scientific journals.

Dr. Dongxing Zha is institute head of the Oncology Research for Biologics and Immunotherapy Translation (ORBIT) platform at MD Anderson Cancer Center. The platform is a unique group of clinicians, researchers and drug development experts working collaboratively to develop biologic and cell-based therapies. Under his leadership, ORBIT is collaborating with pharmaceutical companies to develop novel T cell receptor (TCR) like antibody in treatment of cancers at clinical stage. He is a seasoned drug development leader dedicated to the translation of immune-oncology discoveries into innovative anti-cancer therapies. Dr. Zha was Group leader at Merck & Co., Inc. before he joined MD Anderson where was working on antibody discovery and engineering for various diseases treatment.

Dr. Mei-Yun Zhang obtained her B.A. and M.S. degrees from China Agricultural University, and Ph.D. in Natural Science from Aachen Technical University, Germany. After a postdoc training in NCI, NIH, she was promoted to Scientist. She was appointed Assistant Professor and served as a Faculty member in the Department of Microbiology, The University of Hong Kong. She then moved on to biotech industry and joined Amgen in 2015 as Principal Scientist, Antibody Discovery Lead at Amgen China R&D Center. She has conducted extensive basic researches in cancer and infectious diseases and led biologics drug early discovery throughout her career. She has 58 peer-reviewed publications and holds 7 issued patents or patent applications. Since she joined Amgen, she has been focused on developing innovative technologies for antibody discovery and established camelid single domain antibody platform and antibody phenotypic screening platform at Amgen.

Dr. Bin Zhang is a Professor at the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and the Director of the Mount Sinai Center for Transformative Disease Modeling at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. His expertise lies in machine learning, pattern recognition, bioinformatics, systems biology and with applications to disease modeling and drug discovery. In the past 15 years, he has developed a series of influential gene network inference and analysis algorithms which have been extensively used for identification of novel pathways and gene targets, as well as development of drugs for a variety of human diseases such as cancer, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer's, obesity and diabetes. Currently his research is focused on integration of large scale bulk and single cell RNA-seq data as well as other Omics data into multiscale network models for discovering novel mechanisms of human diseases and developing novel therapeutics.

Dr. Zhang obtained PHD in Cancer Biology from UT Southwestern Medical Center and complete Postdoc training at Professor Jerry Shay’s lab. Her PhD and Postdoc work has identified a targeted therapy for colorectal cancer patient with APC truncating mutation that is currently in development by Barricade Therapeutics. Dr. Zhang Jointed AbbVie as a Senior Scientist afterwards, working within Oncology Discovery department. Co-authored many high profile manuscripts, including Nature, Science translational Medicine, Nature Communication etc.

Dr. Can (Martin) Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Harvard Medical School (HMS). After receiving his MD and Master’s degree at the Weifang Medical College, China and then his PhD at Drexel University, PA, Dr. Zhang conducted a post-doctoral fellowship at MGH, before he became an Instructor and then an Assistant Professor of Neurology at MGH and HMS. Dr. Zhang’s primary research program has been focused on abeta-related molecular mechanisms and compounds in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), particularly those with potentials for a better understanding and intervention of AD. Dr. Zhang has also studied aging-related biomarkers underlying AD, including gamma-secretase, RIPK1 and Sirt1, and is co-inventing new molecular probes for visualizing these proteins.

Sr Principal Scientist

Dr. Daohong Zhou is a Professor in the Department of Pharmacodynamics at the College of Pharmacy, University of Florida (UF) at Gainesville. He serves as the Associate Director for Translation and Drug Development and the Harry E. Innes Endowed Professor of Cancer Research at the UF Health Cancer Center. His studies has led to the discovery of the first potent and broad-spectrum senolytic agent, ABT263. More recently, he developed several Bcl-xl PROTACs as a better senolytics and anticancer agents than ABT263.

Christopher W. am Ende is the Chemical Biology and Exploratory Project Synthesis lead in the Internal Medicine group at Pfizer. Chris received a BS in Biochemistry from the University of Delaware, conducting undergraduate research with Professor Neal J. Zondlo designing lanthanide-binding peptides. He then pursued his graduate studies at Stony Brook University working with Professor Peter J. Tonge where he developed slow, tight binding inhibitors of InhA, the enoyl reductase from M. tuberculosis, and under the direction of Kathlyn A. Parker, completed the first total synthesis of the natural product bisabosqual A. He has published >55 journal articles and patents, serves as a steering committee member for the New York Academy of Sciences Chemical Biology Discussion Group and was named American Chemical Society Young Investigator. Additionally, Chris is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Connecticut College.