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EFMC Award Lectures
PROUS INSTITUTE - OVERTON AND MEYER AWARD FOR NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN DRUG DISCOVERY
Herbert Waldmann was born in Neuwied, Germany and studied chemistry at the University of Mainz where he received his PhD in organic chemistry in 1985 under the guidance of Horst Kunz. After a postdoctoral appointment with George Whitesides at Harvard University, he completed his habilitation at the University of Mainz in 1991. In 1999 he was appointed Director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology Dortmund and Professor of Biochemistry at TU Dortmund University. His research interests lie in the syntheses of signal transduction modulators and the syntheses of natural product inspired compound libraries and their biological evaluation.
Close window NAUTA PHARMACOCHEMISTRY AWARD FOR MEDICINAL CHEMISTRY AND CHEMICAL BIOLOGY
UCB EHRLICH AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN MEDICINAL CHEMISTRY
Prize Lectures
Michael Jung received his BA in 1969 from Rice University and his PhD in 1973 from Columbia University, where he worked with Gilbert Stork as an NSF Fellow. After a NATO postdoctoral fellowship with Albert Eschenmoser at the ETH in Zurich, he joined the faculty at UCLA in 1974, where he is now a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and the UC Presidential Chair in Medicinal Chemistry. He is an authority on synthetic medicinal chemistry and has more than 325 patents and/or applications arising from both his consulting activities and his own research. He has more than 12 ongoing collaborations with biologists at UCLA and elsewhere. Two compounds from his lab have been approved: 1) Xtandi, approved 8/31/12 for the treatment of castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC), and 2) Erleada, approved 2/14/18 for the treatment of non-metastatic CRPC. He has published over 370 articles and given over 650 lectures on his research.
Close window IUPAC-RICHTER PRIZE 2022
Dr. Marie-Hélène Larraufie is currently the head of Molecular, Cell and Chemical Biology at the pharmaceutical company Almirall, headquartered in Barcelona (Spain). Her team focuses on target identification and target validation activities, support of on-going drug discovery programs, as well as the exploration of new modalities. With a prime focus on targeted protein degradation, Marie is leading several collaborative efforts between Almirall and academic teams to explore the potential of bifunctional degraders and glue degraders for immune-inflammatory skin diseases. Prior to Almirall, Marie worked as a team leader in the Chemical Genetics group of Novartis in Cambridge, USA. Her team was focused on phenotypic screening and the exploration of novel modalities such as prodrugs and RNA binders for oncology, renal diseases, and haematological disorders. Marie completed her graduate research in Organic Chemistry at the Institut Parisien de Chimie Moleculaire (Paris, France), followed by postdoctoral research in Chemical Biology at Columbia University (NY, USA) in the group of Prof. Brent Stockwell.
Close window EFMC PRIZE FOR A YOUNG MEDICINAL CHEMIST OR CHEMICAL BIOLOGIST IN INDUSTRY
Dr. Remuinan studied Chemistry in Madrid and received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1997 from Universidad de Alcala (Madrid). In that year, he moved to UK for postdoctoral research at Nottingham University to work in total synthesis of natural products. In 2001, he begun his proffesional carreer as Medicinal chemist at pharmaceutical industry (Pharmamar, Ely lilly and GSK). In 2010 he was appointed as Project Leader of both lead generation and lead optimization programs in Global Health Unit at GSK. Dr. Remuinan has authored more than 20 research publications and 15 international patents in tuberculosis.
Close window GALAPAGOS AWARD LECTURE (Award-winning Team: Bioversys/University of Lille/GSK)
Raphaël Rodriguez, PhD, FRSC, is a Research Director at the CNRS and a Senior Principal Investigator at Institut Curie, where he holds the Marie Curie Chair of Chemical Biology. He trained under the mentorships of Sir J. E. Baldwin (Oxford) and Sir S. Balasubramanian (Cambridge) from whom he acquired deep knowledge of chemistry. A key scientific contribution of his has been to discover the prevalent role of d-block metals in the regulation of cell plasticity and the dicovery of a universal metal uptake mechanism mediated by CD44 and hyaluronate. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and has received various awards, including the Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award, the Prix Lacassagne (Collège de France), and the Grand Prix Charles Defforey (Institut de France). He also is the scientific co-founder of several companies including SideROS and Adrestia Therapeutics.
Close window KLAUS GROHE PRIZE 2022
Olalla Vázquez is an Associate Professor in Chemical Biology at the University of Marburg (Germany). She graduated in Chemistry and received her PhD in Organic Chemistry (2010) from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). There, Olalla worked on artificial transcription factors and fluorescent DNA binders under the supervision of Prof. Jose Luis Mascareñas and Prof. Eugenio M. Vázquez. As PhD student, she joined the labs of Prof. Gregory L. Verdine (2006) at Harvard University and Prof. Oliver Seitz (2008) at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Afterwards, she returned to Berlin to explore RNA-templated reactions for cancer therapy as Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow. In 2014 she was appointed as Assistant Professor at the University of Marburg to manage the newborn Chemical Biology division. In April 2020, Olalla successfully passed her tenure evaluation, and consequently, she was promoted in January 2021. Her main interests are the development of innovative optochemical tools combining organic chemistry and biological approaches.
Close window EFMC PRIZE FOR A YOUNG MEDICINAL CHEMIST OR CHEMICAL BIOLOGIST IN ACADEMIA Plenary Speakers
Benoît Déprez received a degree of pharmaceutical sciences from the school of pharmacy of Lille and a PhD in medicinal chemistry in the Lab of André Tartar at the Institut Pasteur de Lille (1997).With André Tartar, he created the High Throughput Chemistry laboratory of the Institut Pasteur that became in 1997 the chemistry department of Cerep. In 1999, after 3 years spent at Cerep as Head of Chemistry and Site Manager, he was hired by Devgen, a Belgian start-up in Gent (Flanders), where he set up Drug Discovery activities using C.elegans. From 1995 on, he managed several collaborations between biotech or academic labs and pharmaceutical companies (GSK, Merck KGa, Sanofi, Genentech). Benoît Deprez is currently Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the Faculty of Pharmacy (U. Lille) and founder and director of Inserm Lab U761, now U1177 based at the Institut Pasteur de Lille and the Faculty of pharmacy. His research interests primarily focus on early drug discovery : target validation, medicinal chemistry and pharmacokinetic. Areas explored by his team are infectious diseases, metabolic diseases, and cancer using a molecular approach and cutting edge screening technologies including high throughput cell imaging. Benoit is correspondent member of the Académie Nationale de Pharmacie. In 2013, he founded APTEEUS with Terence Beghyn, a company focused on personalized drug discovery for rare monogenic diseases. In 2016, APTEEUS was a recipient of Individualized Medecine Award at the Concours Mondial d’Innovation. In June 2018, he was appointed as Scientific Advisor to the Board of the Institut Pasteur de Lille, then, in March 2019, as Scientific Director of the Institut Pasteur de Lille. Three candidate drugs discovered in his lab are currently licenced for clinical development to biotech and pharmaceutical companies.
Close window PL001 - Boosting « Chance and Necessity » with Experience and Molecular Creativity
Prof Eric Miska (h=68, >43,000 citations on Google Scholar; >130 papers; 3 patents) is a molecular cell biologist with a focus on gene regulation, RNA and epigenetics. Eric studied mathematics, physics and biology at Heidelberg, Berlin and Mainz and received a BA in Biochemistry from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1996. He received his PhD in Pathology from the University of Cambridge, UK, in 2000, studying epigenetics with Prof Tony Kouzarides. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Nobel laureate (2002) Bob Horvitz at the MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA from 2000 to 2004, where he did pioneering work on regulatory RNA. Prof Miska started his independent research group at the Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge in 2005. Now he is the Herchel Smith Professor of Molecular Genetics and Deputy Director of the Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St. John’s College. Eric is also an associated faculty member at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Prof Miska was an EMBO Young Investigator, and is a full member of EMBO since 2012. He was the 2013 recipient of the Hooke Medal awarded by the British Society of Cell Biology. Prof Miska is a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator, and has been the PI of a Cancer Research UK Programme grant since 2005. He has also been awarded grants from the ERC, HFSP, BBSRC and Leverhulme Trust. So far, he has given over 200 invited lectures, has organised four international conferences and run workshops for EMBO, NIH and HHMI. He is also a Founder and Director of a £20 million University of Cambridge spin-out, STORM Therapeutics Ltd.
Close window PL002 - The Shape and Modification of RNA in Health and Disease
Professor Sarah Reisman earned a BA in Chemistry from Connecticut College in New London, CT and
her Ph.D. in chemistry from Yale University, conducting research with Prof. John L. Wood in the area of
natural product total synthesis. As an NIH post-doctoral fellow, Sarah pursued studies in the field of
asymmetric catalysis working with Prof. Eric Jacobsen at Harvard University. In 2008, Sarah joined the
faculty at the California Institute of Technology where she is now the Bren Professor of Chemistry.
Research in the Reisman laboratory seeks to advance the science of chemical synthesis, through
synergistic contributions in both strategy design for natural product synthesis and reaction
development. Reisman is recognized as a leader in the area of natural product synthesis, where her
group has contributed new strategy-driven approaches a number of complex highly oxidized natural
products. In addition to her program in natural product synthesis, Reisman has made impactful
contributions to the rapidly advancing field of Ni-catalysis, with an emphasis on asymmetric reductive
cross-coupling reactions. Reisman is an editorial board member at Organic Syntheses and an
associate editor for the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Reisman has been recognized with
a number of awards for teaching and research, including an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a
Cottrell Scholar Award, the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, the Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award,
the Margaret Faul Women in Chemistry award, and the ACS Elias J. Corey Award.
Close window PL003 - Necessity is the Mother of Invention: Natural Products and the Chemistry They Inspire
Professor Outi Vaarala, M.D., Ph.D. is a medical doctor (University of Helsinki) and has a PhD in immunology. Outi Vaarala was appointed as a Professor of Pediatric Immunology, Linkoping University, Sweden, in 2000, and as a Professor of Autoimmune Diseases, Lund University, Sweden, in 2015.
As of June 2020, she was appointed as Senior Vice President for Research and Development of the Orion Group and is a member of the Orion Executive Management Board. Vaarala has held the position of Vice President, Oncology Research in Orion’s Research and Development as of June 2019. Prior to Orion, Vaarala led drug discovery and development from target identification to clinical Phase 2 studies in Respiratory Inflammation and Autoimmunity therapy area, first at AstraZeneca, Sweden, and later at Medimmune/AstraZeneca, USA.
Outi Vaarala has excellent background and experience from various leadership positions in Research and Development in the international pharmaceutical industry as well as a long experience of immunology and remarkable career in the academy. She has published more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific articles in internationally renowned scientific journals.
Current key positions of trust: Member of the Board of Directors: Tampere University Foundation, Finland 2021- and Member of Steering Group, National Drug Discovery Development Platform, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden 2022-. Former key positions of trust: 2005-2014 Permanent expert at the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
Close window PL004 - Drivers of Innovation in Drug Discovery Invited Speakers
Louise is a Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College London and a Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute. Her group is interested in expanding the potential of cyclic peptide screening technologies to develop novel cyclic peptide tools. In 2014, Louise obtained her doctorate from the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof. Chris Schofield and Prof. Christina Redfield, focussing on mechanistic studies of histone demethylases. Following further postdoctoral work in Oxford, she was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship to work in the group of Prof. Hiroaki Suga at the University of Tokyo, where she developed her interest in cyclic peptides. She established her independent group in late 2018, where she continues to be interested in understanding enzyme-catalysed post-translational modifications and developing new approaches to probe these with cyclic peptide-based tools.
Close window LE092 - De Novo Cyclic Peptides as Chemical Tools to Explore Epigenetic Regulation
Karine Alvarez obtained a PhD in 1999 in Bio-organic chemistry at the university of Montpellier II. After a post-doc position in the chemistry department in Barcelona University, she joined the structural biology laboratory AFMB (Architecture and Functions of Biological Macromolecules) in Aix-Marseille University in 2001 as a CNRS research scientist (Institut de Chimie (INC, section 16).
She is currently Directrice de Recherche. She is the Head of the “Antiviral Medicinal Chemistry” thematic group (5 people) in the team “Viral Replicases: Structure, Mechanism and Drug-design”, led by Dr B. CANARD.
Her research area is the development in a multidisciplinary environment of antiviral molecules against human pathogenic viruses as HIV, HCV, HEV, Dengue virus, LCMV, LACV, SARS-Cov-2 and tools to better understand the replicative machinery of these viruses.
She has specialized in the field of antivirals, nucleos(t)ides and phosphorylated effectors. She also developed biophysical and enzymatic screening assays.
Since the beginning of her career, she has been involved in the funding and supervision of her research with more than 20 grants and projects funded and 40 people supervised.
She was awarded the bronze medal of the CNRS chemistry institute in 2011.
She is the author of 55 publications
Close window LE085 - Addressing Current Challenges in Antiviral Therapies Against Emerging RNA Viruses
Michelle Arkin is Professor and Chair of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco and co-director of the Small Molecule Discovery Center. Her lab focuses on developing chemical probes and drug leads for novel targets, with a particular interest in protein-protein interactions and protein-degradation networks. Prior to UCSF, Michelle worked at Sunesis Pharmaceuticals, where she helped discover protein-protein interaction inhibitors for IL-2 and LFA-1 (lifitigrast, marketed by Novartis). Michelle held an NSF predoctoral fellowship at Caltech and Damon Runyon Cancer Research postdoctoral fellowship at Genentech. She is a cofounder of Ambagon and Elgia Therapeutics.
Close window LE029 - Fragment-Based Approaches to Stabilize Protein-Protein Interactions
Andrea started his carrier as drug designer in academia before joining Organon, a global pharmaceutical company in the Netherlands. He earned his degree in MD, Computational Chemistry from University of Catania and then in Medicinal and Pharmaceutical Chemistry from University of Parma.
Andrea leads the Business Unit R&D Platforms and Services of Dompé Pharmaceuticals and is the coordinator of Dompé EXSCALATE research and development platform. He has also been responsible for the Joint Bioinformatics Groups at the IBP Institute of the National Research Council of Italy since 2015. Co-Funder of the Avicenna Alliance for European in-silico medicine awareness. Since 2022 member of the PRACE Industrial Advisory Committee supporting HPC development and adoption in Europe.
During the past twenty years, Andrea has been responsible for developing proprietary computational tools such as LiGen™, GPCRBase™, and LigandBase™ and most recently was the Principal Investigator of two EU-funded projects -- EXSCALATE4COV and LIGATE.
Author of more than 30 peer-reviewed scientific publications and co-inventor of more than 10 patents.
Andrea lead to the development of two drugs currently in clinical trials
Close window LE086 - Embrace Complexity: in Silico Polypharmacological Profiling to Repurpose Medicines and Design New Drugs
Amy Bittner McCracken began her career at Merck Sharpe and Dohme in 2004 as a Staff Chemist within Discovery Chemistry organization after completing her bachelor’s degree at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA. Early in her career, Amy was given the opportunity to pursue graduate studies as part of the selective Merck Doctoral Program. She obtained her Ph.D. at Princeton University under the supervision of Prof. Erik Sorensen. Since receiving her Ph.D., Amy has impacted pipeline programs that spanned several therapeutic areas from cardiovascular to oncology. She has worked across multiple modalities from traditional small molecule to large peptide projects. In addition, Dr. Bittner is adept at applying of high throughput experimentation (HTE) to solve synthetic and medicinal chemistry problems. Amy is currently an Associate Principal Scientist in the Discovery Chemistry NJ.
Close window LE020 - Inhibiting the MYC Oncogene through Cell Active Max-E47 (ME-47)
Benjamin Blasco joined GARDP in November 2018 as a Discovery Senior Project Manager to provide scientific support and leadership to a number of drug discovery project teams working on novel approaches to treat drug-resistant bacterial infections.
Benjamin has over 10 years’ experience working on two of the “big three” infectious diseases (tuberculosis and malaria), with a broad expertise in microbiology, molecular pharmacology and drug discovery. Prior to joining GARDP, Benjamin worked as a Research Scientist at Medicines for Malaria Venture, managing several projects spanning from biology test platforms to drug discovery programmes. In particular, he delivered antimalarial drug resistance data and strategy through projects in collaboration with academic leaders in this field and expert investigators working closely with clinical sites in Africa.
Before that, he studied virulence regulators of Mycobacterium tuberculosis at the chair of Microbial Pathogenesis of Prof. Stewart Cole (Global Health Institute, EPFL) and developed a mycobacterial assay to screen for anti-virulence compounds.
Benjamin holds a Master degree in Molecular and Biological Chemistry and a PhD in Molecular Life Sciences from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). He also obtained his Project Management Professional (PMP) certification in 2017.
Close window LE033 - The Global Antibiotic R&D Partnership: Helping to Advance the Discovery & Development of New Treatments for Bacterial Infections
LE064 - Molecular Vending Machines for the On-Demand Synthesis of Drug-Like Molecules
In 2012, Pascal Bonnet joined the Institute of Organic and Analytical Chemistry (ICOA) from the University of Orléans (France) as full professor. He set up the team “Structural Bioinformatics and Chemoinformatics”, which develops and integrates novel computational methods for drug discovery. His research interests also focus on the development of an integrative in silico platform for kinase research. In 2016, he was appointed director of the ICOA and since 2021 he was elected vice president for research of the University of Orléans. After completing his PhD in 2001 at the University of Orléans and at the University of Barcelona (Spain), he moved to a postdoctoral position at the University of Manchester, UK. As a scientist, he joined Janssen-Cilag in France and then Janssen-Pharmaceutica in Belgium in 2003. He was involved in several drug discovery projects mainly in the oncology therapeutic area. Promoted Principal Scientist in 2010, he was leading the Kinase Platform at Janssen. He contributed to the development of a clinical drug candidate, erdafitinib, a FGFR kinase inhibitor discovered by FBDD approved in April 2019 against bladder cancer.
Close window LE081 - A Novel Fragment-Based Ligand Design Tool : Application to Kinase Research
Andreas Brunschweiger studied pharmacy at the University of Kiel (Germany), and obtained
his PhD in the group of Prof. Christa Müller at the University of Bonn (Germany) in 2007. He
stayed as postdoctoral researcher in Christa Müller´s group to develop small molecule
inhibitors for targets associated with neurodegenerative diseases in a collaboration project with
UCB Pharma. Then, he joined Prof. Jonathan Hall's research group at the ETH Zurich
(Switzerland) in 2010. There, he was involved in the design and synthesis of chemical biology
tools to study microRNA biology, and the design and synthesis of short oligonucleotides as
microRNA inhibitors. In 2013 he took up his present position as a group leader at the
Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology of the TU Dortmund University. His current
research interests include the development of new synthesis and encoding strategies that
allow for expanding the chemical space of DNA-encoded small molecule screening libraries,
computational tools that support screening library design, and development of protein-protein
interaction inhibitors
Close window LE022 - A DNA Barcode with Enhanced Chemical Stability for DNA-encoded Library Design
Youngjoo Byun graduated from Seoul National University (Seoul, South Korea) with BS and MS degrees. He received his PhD from Ohio State University College of Pharmacy (Columbus, USA) in 2006 under the supervision of Dr. Werner Tjarks. Before joining OSU's graduate program, he worked as a Research Scientist in the Drug Discovery Division of AmorePacific Corporation from 1996 to 2001. He was a postdoctoral fellow and instructor at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, USA) under the guidance of Dr. Martin G. Pomper with a project to develop PSMA-based imaging probes. In 2011, he joined a faculty at the College of Pharmacy, Korea University (Sejong, South Korea). He is currently Professor at the KU College of Pharmacy and Director of the Institute of Pharmaceutical Science and Translational Research. His research interests include the discovery of new small molecules targeting PSMA and hepsin, cytokine inhibitors targeting interleukin-33 and thymic stromal lymphopoietin, and anti-biofilm inhibitors targeting LasR and RhlR.
Close window LE101 - Medicinal Chemistry in the Development of Molecular Imaging Probes Targeting Prostate-Specific Membrane Antigen
Sébastien Campagne was born in Foix, France and studied biotechnologies and biochemistry at the
University of Toulouse III where he graduated with his PhD in structural biology in 2010 under the
guidance of Alain Milon and Virginie Gervais. After a postdoctoral appointment with Frédéric Allain at
ETH Zurich and consulting activities for pharmaceutical companies (Roche and Skyhawk Therapeutics),
he was awarded a permanent researcher position at INSERM and joined the ARNA Institute in
Bordeaux. As principal investigator, his research interests focus on the fundamental aspects of gene
expression regulation at the RNA level, while he applies his findings to develop innovative RNA-based
strategies against human diseases. By following a multidisciplinary approach combining nucleic acid
chemistry, biochemistry, structural biology and cell biology, Sébastien Campagne’s research aims to
develop novel RNA therapeutics against inherited diseases and cancer.
Close window LE074 - Fundamental Basis for SMN2 Specific Splicing Correction by Small Molecules and Bulge Repair Mechanism
Lisa Candish received her PhD from Monash University, Australia, under the supervision of Prof. David W. Lupton in 2014. In the same year she relocated to Germany as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow to carry out postdoctoral studies at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster with Prof. Frank Glorius. Since 2017, she has been working in Drug Discovery Sciences for Bayer AG, Wuppertal, as a laboratory head in medicinal chemistry. In addition, she leads the department's photochemistry laboratory.
Close window LE065 - Photocatalysis in Drug Discovery
Connor W. Coley is an Assistant Professor at MIT in the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Caltech and MIT, respectively, and did his postdoctoral training at the Broad Institute. His research group at MIT develops new methods at the intersection of data science, chemistry, and laboratory automation to streamline discovery in the chemical sciences with an emphasis on therapeutic discovery. Key research areas in the group include the design of new neural models for representation learning on molecules, data-driven synthesis planning, in silico strategies for predicting the outcomes of organic reactions, model-guided Bayesian optimization, and de novo molecular generation. Connor is a recipient of C&EN’s “Talented Twelve” award, Forbes Magazine’s “30 Under 30” for Healthcare, the NSF CAREER award, and the Bayer Early Excellence in Science Award. Outside of MIT, Connor serves as an advisor to both early- and late-stage companies including Entos, Revela, Galixir, Kebotix, Anagenex, and Dow.
Close window LE050 - A Perspective on AI and Automation for the Medicinal Chemistry Lab Virtual Presentation
David has 25 years of experience in medicinal chemistry within the pharmaceutical industry (GSK), mainly in the discovery of antibiotic drugs, including working on Augmentin (Beecham) at the start of his pharmaceutical career and Gepotidicin (GSK) at the end. After leaving GSK, David has spent the last 14 years in biotech. Prior to Antabio, where he has been for the past decade, David worked with biotech companies in the antibacterial area (Prolysis, Biota) in support of their medicinal chemistry efforts while simultaneously holding a part-time academic position in the Chemistry Department of University College London (UCL). David’s role at Antabio is Head of Medicinal Chemistry. He is an inventor on 40 patents and an author on 37 papers.
Close window LE035 - Discovery and Preclinical Development of ANT3310, a Broad-Spectrum β-Lactamase Inhibitor which Potentiates Meropenem Against Carbapenem-Resistant Bacteria
Charlotte is Professor of Structural Bioinformatics in the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford and Chief Scientist of Biologics AI at Exscientia. She is also a co-director of the Systems Approaches to Biomedical Research Centre for Doctoral Training which she founded in 2009.
She served on SAGE, the UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, during the COVID-19 pandemic and acted as UK Research and Innovation’s COVID-19 Response Director. She has held numerous senior roles at the University of Oxford and until recently was the Deputy Executive Chair of the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
At Oxford, Charlotte leads the Oxford Protein Informatics Group (OPIG), who work on diverse problems across immunoinformatics, protein structure and small molecule drug discovery; using statistics, AI and computation to generate biological and medical insight.
Her work focuses on the development of novel algorithms, tools and databases that are openly available to the community. These tools are widely used web resources and are also part of several Pharma drug discovery pipelines. Charlotte is on several advisory boards and has consulted extensively with industry. She has set up a consulting arm within her own research group as a way of promoting industrial interaction and use of the group’s software tools.
Charlotte completed a chemistry degree at Oxford followed by a PhD in Bioinformatics at the University of Cambridge and a 2 year Wellcome Fellowship at UCLA.
Close window LE051 - The Power and Pitfalls of Machine Learning in Early Stage Drug Discovery
Lourdes received her B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Basque Country (Spain) in 2003, and her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Autonoma University of Madrid (Spain) in 2008. Since 2008, she has been working within GSK, mostly on the development of new drugs against tuberculosis. At GSK, she has been involved in several projects; both target-based and phenotypic and in different phases, some in collaborations like a portfolio with Dundee University or a Wellcome Trust sponsored programme. In Nov 2019, she moved to work at Infectious Diseases & Public Health Institute in China, supporting public-private partnerships, like Tsinghua University-GSK postdoctoral Fellowship program. Currently, she serves as Chief of Staff in Global Health Medicines R&D Unit. She is experienced in medicinal chemistry, tuberculosis, drug discovery & pre-clinical research.
Close window LE034 - Novel Tetrazole Inhibitor of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis Tryptophan Synthase
Lluc Farrera Soler has a chemistry degree from the University of Barcelona (2014). Supported by an Alfred Werner Scholarship (SCS Foundation), in 2015 he carried out a MSc in Chemical Biology from the NCCR Chemical Biology (a collaboration between the University of Geneva and the EPFL). He later pursued his studies with a PhD in the laboratory of Prof. Nicolas Winssinger (UNIGE) working on the development and application of PNA-encoded libraries both for drug discovery and SARS-CoV-2 epitope mapping. In 2022 he started a post-doc in peptide engineering and diagnostic assay development in a collaborative project between the laboratory of Prof. Christian Heinis (EPFL) and Bühlmann Laboratories.
Close window EFMC-YMCS Prize 2021
Dr Yann Foricher, after joining Sanofi-Aventis as medicinal chemist at Strasbourg in 2004, then moved to Paris in 2011 to work in Oncology Business Division as MedChem team leader and project leader. Since 2017, he has been a medicinal chemist section head in Integrated Drug Discovery Platform. From 2004 to now, he has worked on different projects (target validation with tool compound, hit to lead and lead to candidate) in neuroscience, diabetes, immuno-inflammation & oncology therapeutic areas. Following a chemistry engineer school ENSCMu in France, he obtained his PhD with Prof John Mann on Synthesis of Huperzine A skeleton (University of Reading & at Queen’s University of Belfast - UK) and moved to a postdoctoral research position with Prof Jonathan Clayden (University of Manchester - UK). Before joining Sanofi, he worked as process chemist for DSM Nutritional Products (Switzerland, ex-Roche Vitamins) on vitamin E process.
Close window LE073 - Targeting RNA with Small Molecules, A New Therapeutic Strategy
David B. Freeman is an Associate Director of Chemical Biology at Kronos Bio, Inc. where he leads Small Molecule Microarray (SMM) screening and chemical tool development efforts. Dave obtained a B.S. in Chemistry from University of California, Santa Barbara before completing his doctoral studies focused on the total synthesis of natural products with Professor John Wood at Colorado State University. He then completed post-doctoral training with Corey Stephenson at Boston University, after which, he served in the US Army, Public Health Command, where he managed a molecular diagnostics lab charged with monitoring endemic diseases in the southern US. After serving, Dave returned to his passion for oncology small molecule drug development and worked with Angela Koehler at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. He then joined Kronos Bio, Inc. as its first employee where he spearheaded medicinal chemistry efforts leading to the discovery of KB-0742, a highly selective, orally bioavailable small molecule CDK9 inhibitor.
Close window LE019 - Discovery of KB-0742, a Potent, Selective, Orally Bioavailable Small Molecule Inhibitor of CDK9/Cyclin T1 for MYC-Dependent Cancers
Marta Frigolé-Vivas, PhD
Marta Frigolé-Vivas is a senior scientist at Dewpoint Therapeutics.
She has a background in medicinal chemistry and condensate biology. She is passionate about leveraging condensate biology to develop novel drugs for currently unmet medical needs.
She completed her PhD at the IRB Barcelona on the use of small molecules to modulate the function of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs), which are not amenable to structure-based drug discovery methods. Tuning the propensity of IDPs to form condensates emerged as a promising strategy.
Close window LE042 - Leveraging Biomolecular Condensates for Drug Discovery
Amanda L. Garner is a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh and completed NIH-funded postdoctoral studies at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Dr. Garner’s independent research integrates chemical biology, medicinal chemistry, and molecular and cellular biology approaches for early-stage drug discovery efforts with a primary focus on validating new therapeutic targets in RNA biology.
Close window LE072 - Enabling Technologies for Revealing Druggable Paths in RNA Biology
Matthew Gaunt is the 1702 Yusuf Hamied Professor of Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. He began independent research in 2003, was promoted to Lecturer in 2006, Reader in 2010, Full Professor in 2012, and was Elected to the 1702 Chair in 2019. He graduated from the University of Birmingham in 1995 and was awarded a PhD from the University of Cambridge after studies with Dr. Jonathan Spencer. He moved to the University of Pennsylvania on a GlaxoWellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship where he worked with Professor Amos B Smith III before returning to Cambridge as a Ramsay Memorial Fellow and Junior Research Fellow of Magdalene College when he worked with Professor Steven Ley.
Since 2003 his research interested have included palladium catalyzed C–H activation, enantioselective organocatalysis, high oxidation state copper catalysis, photoredox catalysis, protein functionalization and developing high throughput experimentation platforms for chemical synthesis. The groups research has been acknowledged by a number of awards, including 2019 RSC Synthetic Organic Chemistry Award, 2016 Cope Scholar Award and the RSC Corday-Morgan Medal in 2013.
He is Director of the EPSRC Centre of Doctoral Training on Automated Chemical Synthesis Enabled by Digital Molecular Technologies and co-Director of the Institute for Digital Molecular Technology within the Dept. of Chemistry.
Close window LE009 - New Synthetic Chemistry to Probe the Biology of Modified Nucleic Acids
Matthias Gehringer studied chemistry at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Montpellier (ENSCM), and the University of Heidelberg. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Tübingen where he worked on reversible and irreversible inhibitors of the protein kinase JAK3. As a postdoc at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich, he focused on the total synthesis of mycolactones and on targeted antibiotic–protein conjugates. In 2019, he was appointed Assistant Professor for Medicinal Chemistry at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Tübingen. Since 2020, he has been an associate PI in the Cluster of Excellence "Image Guided and Functionally Instructed Tumor Therapies (iFIT)" at the University Hospital and the Faculty of Medicine, University of Tübingen. His research in the areas of medicinal chemistry and chemical biology is mainly dedicated to covalent protein kinase inhibitors and novel covalent targeting approaches.
Close window LE047 - Discovery of Covalent Protein Kinase Inhibitors Targeting Cysteines in the Hinge Region
Carmen Gil received her PhD from Complutense University of Madrid (Spain) in 2001. After a postdoctoral appointment at Bonn University (Germany), she joined the Medicinal Chemistry Institute (CSIC) in 2004 (first as Associate Researcher and since 2007 as Tenured Scientist). In 2014, she cofounded the spin-off Ankar Pharma. Currently, she is Research Scientist at the Biological Research Center (CSIC). Her main expertise is in the drug discovery field. With a strong background in medicinal chemistry, her research is applied with a high content of translational research and focuses on those areas that will have an impact on the treatment of human diseases. Her main research field has been neurodegenerative diseases and more recently, she also focuses her efforts on infectious diseases.
Close window LE084 - Searching for Drugs against Pandemic Viruses
LE049 - Driving Lead Optimization with BRADSHAW
György M. Keserű obtained his Ph.D. at Budapest, Hungary and joined Sanofi heading a chemistry research lab. He moved to Gedeon Richter in 1999 and he was appointed as the Head of Discovery Chemistry in 2007. He contributed to the discovery of the antipsychotic Vraylar® (cariprazine) that has been approved and marketed from 2016 in US and EU. He served as a director general of the Research Centre for Natural Sciences at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. From 2015 he is heading the Medicinal Chemistry Research Group. György published over 250 papers in medicinal chemistry and drug design and he is a co-inventor in 21 patents. He was awarded by the prestigious Overton and Meyer Award of the European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry and has been elected as Corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Close window LE046 - Covalent Fragment Approaches in Drug Discovery
Professor Koehler is the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT and an Associate Director of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. She is also a founding member of the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine and an Institute Member of the Broad Institute. Dr. Koehler is an advisor to several biopharma companies and a founder of three biotechnology companies. At MIT, she teaches courses focused on biological engineering design for human health and sustainability as well as a course related to both the science and business aspects of biotechnology.
Close window LE017 - Chemical Probe Discovery for Recalcitrant Targets Virtual Presentation
Urban Košak, PhD got his master's degree at the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Ljubljana in November 2011 for the thesis "Synthesis of 3-ketopalimtoyl coenzyme A" which he made under the mentorship of prof. Stanislav Gobec, PhD and co-mentorship of Andreja Kovač, PhD. After graduation, he worked at the Faculty of Pharmacy as a researcher. In 2012 he became a young researcher and in July 2016 he received his PhD for the thesis "Design, synthesis and evaluation of new cholinesterase inhibitors", under the mentorship of prof. Stanislav Gobec, PhD. Since July 2016, he has been employed as a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Ljubljana. His research interests include design, synthesis and evaluation of new drugs for treating and alleviating symptoms of dementia, synthesis of enzyme substrates and development of simple synthetic routes for preparing key intermediates for the synthesis of drugs and excipients.
Close window LE097 - Selective Butyrylcholinesterase Inhibitors for Alleviating Symptoms of Dementia
Brian Lanman is a Director of Research in the Medicinal Chemistry department at Amgen, Inc., based in Thousand Oaks, CA, USA. Brian received his A.B. in Chemistry from Harvard University (1998), where he conducted undergraduate research on the total synthesis of Taxol® with Yoshito Kishi. He subsequently received A.M. (2000) and Ph.D. (2004) degrees from Harvard for research as an NSF fellow on the solid-supported synthesis of tetrahydroisoquinoline antitumor antibiotics in the labs of Andrew Myers. In 2004, he joined Larry Overman’s group at UC Irvine as an NIH postdoctoral fellow, developing methods to access the architecturally complex bis-guanidine natural product palau’amine. Brian joined Amgen’s medicinal chemistry department in 2006, where he has since led chemistry and discovery research efforts in the inflammation, oncology, and cardiovascular therapeutic areas. Most recently, Brian led the medicinal chemistry team that discovered LUMAKRAS®/LUMYKRAS® (sotorasib), Amgen’s first-in-class KRASG12C inhibitor.
Close window LE045 - Inhibiting KRAS: Strategies, Structures, and Lessons Learned in the Invention of Sotorasib
Cristina Mayor-Ruiz obtained her PhD in 2017 at the CNIO (Madrid), unraveling novel mechanisms of resistance to anticancer therapies. In 2018, she joined the group of G. Winter (CeMM, Vienna), where she focused on chemical biology and targeted protein degradation. Since January 2021, she leads her own group at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona). Her research focuses on developing proximity-inducing drugs with therapeutic interest (molecular glues, destabilizers, PROTACs, and beyond), and on tackling biological questions that involve (dys) regulation dynamics of E3 ubiquitin ligases. Dr. Mayor-Ruiz has been honored with national and international awards, such as an ERC Starting grant.
Close window LE001 - Strategies to Discover Molecular Glue Degraders at Scale
Dieter is Senior Principal Scientist in the Isotope Synthesis lab of the Pharma Research and Early Development Unit of Roche in Basel. He is responsible for carbon-14 and tritium labelling of drug and PET tracer candidates for preclinical and clinical studies. One of his research interest includes the development of late-stage tritiations via C-H activation of complex organic molecules and pharmaceuticals. He received his undergraduate and graduate education from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich and performed postdoctoral studies at Harvard University. He is a member of the advisory board of the Journal of Labelled Compounds and Radiopharmaceuticals and an editorial board member of the Chimia.
Close window LE010 - Tritiation of Pharmaceuticals Via Late Stage C-H Functionalization
Dr. Gerhard Müller, Chief Scientific Officer, Anavo Therapeutics
Research Field:
small-molecule drug design around phosphatase modulators
Education and former Profession:
1992: PhD in Organic Chemistry, Technical University of Munich, supervisor: Prof. Horst Kessler
1993-2001: Industry Positions at Glaxo, Verona, Italy; Bayer, Leverkusen, Germany
2001-2003: Head of Medicinal Chemistry at Organon, The Netherlands
2003-2005: Chief Scientific Officer at Axxima Pharmaceuticals, Kinase Platform Company in Munich
2005-2017: Leadership Positions at Proteros Fragments, Mercachem (today Symeres)
2017: co-founder of Gotham Therapeutics, New York-based Biotech in Epitranscriptomics and RNA-targeted drug discovery
2021: co-founder of Anavo Therapeutics, biotech company in phosphatase-targeted drug discovery based in Heidelberg
Close window LE080 - The Phosphatase Family: a Widely Neglected Target Space for Small-Molecule Drug Discovery
Dr. Frank Narjes has over 25 years drug discovery experience gained at Merck, Sharpe & Dohme and AstraZeneca, where he currently is a Senior Principal Scientist in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry. He is passionate about drug discovery and expansion of the druggable target space. In his current role, he leads project teams to deliver clinical candidates with potential across respiratory and autoimmunity diseases. During his career, to advance drug candidates from preclinical to clinical phases, I have worked across several modalities including small molecules, peptides, PROTACs and antibodies and across multiple target classes.
Frank is a coauthor of over 60 publications and coinventor on 40 patents. He did his doctoral thesis in organic chemistry at the University of Hamburg under the supervision of Professor Ernst Schaumann, followed by postdoctoral studies at UC Irvine in the group of Professor Larry Overman.
Close window LE061 - The discovery of the Clinical Candidate AZD0284, a Orally Bioavailable Inverse Agonist of RORG for the Treatment of Psoriasis
Zaneta Nikolovska-Coleska, M.S., Ph.D., Professor of Pathology, Director of Molecular & Cellular Pathology Graduate Program, Associate Director of Program in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Michigan. Dr. Nikolovska-Coleska received her BS in Pharmacy (1987) and MS and PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry (1993 and 1999 respectively) from University Ss. Cyril and Methodius, Skopje, North Macedonia. She held the position of Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at her alma mater university and completed her postdoctoral training at the University of Michigan, under the guidance of Prof. Shaomeng Wang. Dr. Nikolovska-Coleska joined the faculty of the Department of Pathology as a tenure-track Assistant Professor (2008), and was promoted to the tenured Associate Professor in 2015 and Professor in 2021.
Dr. Nikolovska-Coleska serves as the Director of Molecular & Cellular Pathology (MCP) graduate program, Associate-Director of the doctoral Program in Biomedical Sciences (PIBS) at the University of Michigan Medical School, and co-Director of T32 NIH/NIGMS Training Program in Translational Research. Her research is focused on validating and targeting protein-protein interactions, chemical genomics, and development of small-molecule inhibitors as targeted cancer therapies, focusing on apoptotic pathways and epigenetics. Dr. Nikolovska-Coleska has published more than 85 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, more than 100 meeting abstracts, and holds more than 15 international and US patents and patent applications. Prof. Nikolovska-Coleska has received numerous awards including, New Investigator Award from Leukemia Research Foundation, Innovator Award from Harrington Discovery Institute and AACR-Bayer Innovation and Discovery Award. She is a member of the RSC Chemical Biology editorial board and chair of the NIH study section Mechanisms of Cancer Therapeutics A (MCTA). Prof. Nikolovska-Coleska is currently the President for the International Chemical Biology Society (ICBS) and a member of the Board of Directors.
Close window LE013 - Disrupting hDot1L and MLL Oncofusion Protein Interactions as a Novel Therapeutic Strategy
Mikako Ogawa received PhD degree in 2007 from Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Kyoto University (Japan), under the supervision of Prof. Hideo Saji. Thereafter, she worked at National Institute for Longevity Sciences, National Cardio Vascular Center, and Hamamatsu University School of Medicine in Japan. From 2007 to 2009, she worked as a visiting fellow at NCI/NIH, USA. Since 2015, she is a professor of Hokkaido University. She is a molecular imaging chemist, and her research interest is developing new imaging agents, especially for in vivo application. Recently, using the knowledge of in vivo molecular imaging, she is also developing molecular targeted therapeutic agents.
Close window LE100 - Evaluation of Cancer Immunity and Development of Novel Radiolabeling Method with Astatin-211 Virtual Presentation
Prof. Ouyang is associate professor at University of Macau. He has a multidisciplinary background in pharmaceutics & computer modelling, with experience in academia and industry. He obtained his bachelor (2000) and master (2005) in pharmaceutics from Shenyang Pharmaceutical University, China. He completed his PhD in pharmacy at The University of Queensland, Australia, in 2010 and progressed directly to his faculty position (Lecturer in Pharmaceutics, PI) at Aston University (UK). From the end of 2014, he moved to the University of Macau.
Since 2011, he has pioneered the integration of multi-scale modeling, artificial intelligence and big data techniques in the field of drug delivery – “computational pharmaceutics“. He has published 2 books, 5 book chapters and over 70 refereed SCI journal papers. He held 6 approved patents, which had been used in medicinal products. He edited the first book
Close window LE078 - Opportunity and Challenge of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Drug Delivery Virtual Presentation
Sébastien Papot is professor of organic chemistry at the University of Poitiers (France) where he is
heading the Programmed Molecular Systems Team within the IC2MP (Institut de Chimie des Milieux
et Matériaux de Poitiers). Sébastien was the recipient of the Pierre Fabre Award for Therapeutic
Innovation (2014). He was the President of the French Medicinal Chemistry Society (SCT, 2019–2020).
Sébastien is also the cofounder and CSO of Seekyo, a biotechnology company developing new
generation cancer treatments. His research interests include the design of smart drug delivery systems,
in vivo chemistry, functional interlocked systems and prebiotic chemistry.
Close window LE057 - Tumor Activated Therapy
Dr. Alexander Pautsch is a senior principal scientist at Boehringer Ingelheim (BI). He studied chemistry at the universities of Freiburg, Germany and Massachusetts, USA. For his Ph.D. he conducted research with Prof. Georg E. Schulz, Freiburg, working on the structural biology of bacterial membrane proteins and anti-viral drug targets. As a post-doctoral fellow at BI he stayed in the field of protein crystallography, focusing initially on protein kinases. In 2001 he became regular research scientist in BI’s Structural Research group (Biberach, Germany), where he is using biophysical technologies and protein crystallography to support research discovery project teams. There, his experience spans a broad range of drug target families from enzymes, via integral membrane proteins to poorly druggable protein-protein complexes. Being collaborative by nature, he is representing BI research within several precompetitive consortia (GPCR consortium, SGC, EUbOPEN) and has in many cases succeeded to generate mutual value by collaborating with experts in the academic world. In 2019 he was appointed Innovation Facilitator, MedChem, where he is responsible for identifying novel technologies and synergies with internal and external partners. He is invited lecturer on protein crystallography and structure based design in drug discovery" and has been recognized with the Boehringer Research Award.
Close window LE091 - Chemical Probes and How to Find Them
Dijana Pešić graduated in chemistry and obtained her PhD in the field of organic chemistry. She had one-year post-graduate education at University of Trieste (prof. Benedetti group). Scientific carrier Dijana started at Academia (University of Zagreb, Faculty of Science). In pharmaceutical, biotech and CRO companies (PLIVA, GlaxoSmithKline, Galapagos, Fidelta and Selvita) Dijana is working for the last 25 years. Throughout her carrier, she developed broad organic and medicinal chemistry expertise in anti-inflammatory, anti-infective, CNS and oncology therapeutic areas. Dijana was leading a number of projects from hit finding to lead-optimization stage with a range of biological targets from kinases, proteases, GPCRs to protein-protein interactions. Dijana has extensive experience in heterocyclic chemistry as well as in the field of macrocyclic chemistry.
Close window LE062 - Macrolide Inspired Macrocycles as Effective Disruptors of the IL-17A/IL-17RA Interaction
William C. K. Pomerantz, Associate Professor, University of Minnesota. Prof. Pomerantz received his B.S. 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 Ph.D. in chemistry with Professors Sam Gellman and Nick Abbott at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. 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 the Merck Professor Chemistry. His research uses chemical biology and medicinal chemistry approaches for modulating protein-protein interactions involved in transcriptional complexes. 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 class of epigenetic protein complexes. His research had been recognized through several awards including a Sidney Kimmel Cancer Scholar award, an NSF CAREER award, a Cottrell Scholar Award, and an International Chemical Biology Society (ICBS) Rising Star in Chemical Biology award Prof. Pomerantz is currently the global council co-chair for the ICBS, Vice Chair of the ACS Med. Chem. Lett Early Career Board, and councilor for the American Chemical Society.
Close window LE014 - New Opportunities for Studying the Function of the Nucleosome Remodeling Factor, NURF, Through Inhibition and Degradation
Eugen Proschak is currently Professor for Drug Design at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. His research group is working in the field of medicinal chemistry and discovered various novel chemical probes and pharmacological tools, especially for targets involved in lipid signal transduction. Furthermore, they are working on designed multitarget ligands which can be used in inflammatory and metabolic diseases.
Close window LE093 - Chemical Probes for Targets in Lipid Signalling
Renaud joined Edelris in 2018 as the Head of Screening Technologies, where he pioneered the development of AS-MS technologies.
Prior to this, Renaud served as the Chief Operating Officer at Cellipse, a drug discovery start-up company that he co-founded.
During his post-doc time, Renaud developed and applied different screening approaches in the oncology area, for example synthetic lethality and drug enhancers.
He obtained a Ph.D. in chemical biology from the Université Grenoble Alpes, where he worked on the screening of allosteric kinase inhibitors.
He has co-authored over 25 publications and patents.
Close window LE038 - EDELRIS Keymical Space™ and GPCR : Identification of Allosteric Binders by AS-MS
Jean Quancard studied Chemistry at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and continued with a PhD in Chemical Biology at University of Pierre et Marie Curie. In 2004, he moved to Stanford University in the US for a Postdoc with Pr. Barry Trost. Jean joined Global Discovery Chemistry at Novartis in 2006 and since then worked in several therapeutic areas such as autoimmunity, oncology, ophthalmology and neuroscience. Currently, he is Executive Director and Head of Chemistry for the Musculoskeletal disease area where he focuses on drug discovery for neuromuscular diseases, Osteoarthritis and tendon diseases. In addition, Jean is co-leading a global team focused on developing data and digital for discovery chemistry. Jean received several awards including the 2016 Outstanding young medicinal chemist in industry from the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC) and co-authored more than 35 publications and patents. Jean is also a visiting lecturer in Drug Design at EPFL in Lausanne and leads the working group on Best Practices in Medicinal Chemistry for the EFMC.
Close window LE060 - Tipping the Balance: MALT1 Inhibitors with Paradoxical Effects on the Immune System
Dr. Rastinejad is Wellcome-Trust Senior Investigator and Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford, and Senior Kurti Fellow of Brasenose College. He received dual Bachelor degrees from Northwestern University in Mathematics and Biochemistry, and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania in Biophysics. He further trained as a postdoctoral fellow with Paul Sigler at Yale University, where he began his interests in structural characterization of gene-regulatory complexes. His laboratory at Oxford currently studies structures and small-molecule binding properties of transcription factors that act as nutritional, hormonal, and environmental sensors. For his work on nuclear receptors and mammalian bHLH-PAS proteins, Dr. Rastinejad has received multiple career honors, including Glaxo Wellcome Chemistry Scholar award, Established Investigator award from the American Heart Association, and Fellow of Royal Society in Biology.
Close window LE018 - Transcription Factors as Drug-Discovery Targets
Andrea Rentmeister is a Professor at the Department of Chemistry at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster. She studied Chemistry at the Technical University of Graz and the University of Bonn, where she earned her PhD in 2007. After a postdoctoral stay at the California Institute of Technology, she started her independent career as a Junior Professor at the University of Hamburg in 2010. In 2013, Andrea was appointed as Associate Professor at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, and in 2020 promoted to Full Professor.
Research in her lab focuses on RNA at the interface of chemistry and biochemistry and aims to understand and ultimately control the processes affecting mRNA expression and turnover. Andrea received an Emmy Noether Fellowship, an ERC Consolidator and POC Grant and the Hoechst Award of the Aventis Foundation. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and serves on several advisory and executive boards.
Close window LE058 - Investigating and Controlling mRNAs Via Chemo-enzymatic Modification
Tobias Ritter received his undergraduate education in Braunschweig, Germany, Bordeaux, France, Lausanne, Switzerland, and Stanford, US. He has performed undergraduate research with Prof. Barry M. Trost at Stanford, obtained his PhD working with Prof. Erick M. Carreira at ETH Zurich in 2004, and was a postdoc with Prof. Robert H. Grubbs at Caltech. In 2006, Tobias was appointed as Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard, promoted to Associate Professor in 2010, and to Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in 2012. Since 2015 he is director at the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Kohlenforschung in Germany and holds additional faculty appointments at RWTH Aachen and Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. The Ritter lab focuses on late-stage functionalization chemistry, with a focus on fluorination methods and their application to molecular imaging. In 2011, Tobias co-founded SciFluor LifeScience, now OcuTerra Therapeutics, a clinical pharmaceutical company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Close window LE011 - Late-Stage Functionalizations
Marc Robillard is founder and CEO of Tagworks Pharmaceuticals, a spin-out of Philips Healthcare. Tagworks, pioneer of the now widely used Click-to-Release approach, develops and applied in vivo click chemistry to improve the efficacy of cancer therapies. Prior to spinning out in 2011 he worked at Philips Research on molecular imaging and drug delivery and at Kreatech Diagnostics on microarray detection. Marc obtained his MSc and PhD in bio(in)organic chemistry at, respectively, the University of Groningen and the Leiden Institute of Chemistry, The Netherlands.
Close window LE056 - Chemically-Triggered Payload Release in-vivo
Judith Maria Rollinger is Professor of Pharmacognosy/Pharmaceutical Biology and Head of ‘Phytochemistry and Biodiscovery’ at the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Faculty of Life Science, University of Vienna, Austria. Since 2019 she is member of the senate of this University.
She received her Ph.D. in Pharmacognosy of the University of Innsbruck/Austria; for her venia docendi she was among the first to combine cheminformatics, phytochemistry, and ethnopharmacology (habilitation in 2007). She was appointed full Professor of Pharmacognosy/Pharmaceutical Biology at her present institution in 2014. Since 2020 she is the president of the “Society for Medicinal Plant and Natural Product Research”- the largest European learned society, focusing on research on natural products, nature-based drug discovery, medicinal plant research and quality control of herbal medicines.
Her research focuses on the interdisciplinary field of integrating big data analysis (chemoinformatics, chemometry) in natural product research as strategy for the discovery of natural lead structures for treating viral infections, metabolic syndrome and inflammation. Publications resulting from her research have appeared in highly ranked international journals (>120), and as book contributions and patents.
Close window LE005 - Big Data Analyses for the Discovery of Lead Structures from Nature
Fanny Roussi is currently CNRS research director at the Institut de Chimie des Substances Naturelles (ICSN, France). She studied pharmacy and obtained a PhD in Medicinal Chemistry in 1999 in the group of Henri-Philippe Husson (Paris Descartes University, France). She then worked as a post-doctoral fellow in Jack Baldwin’s group at Oxford University (UK), on the biomimetic synthesis of a family of natural compounds. In 2001, she joined the ICSN as a CNRS researcher to work on the synthesis of natural bioactive compounds. Since 2013, she has been the team leader of the “Plant Metabolites” group, which aims to valorise secondary metabolites of therapeutic interest identified from the ICSN plant extract library. The main lines of research currently being developed in the team focus on the discovery of original antitumor agents and new anti-infectives.
Close window LE006 - Design of Naturally Inspired Anti-Cancer Compounds that Modulate Cholesterol Homeostasis
Jörg Scheuermann studied Chemistry at the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and at the ETH Zurich (Switzerland). During his Ph.D. studies at the ETH Zurich he worked on the identification of novel binding molecules to markers of angiogenesis. Since 2002, as a Postdoc, he developed DNA-encoded library (DEL) technology in different implementations together with Dario Neri, with whom he holds the publication record in the DEL field. JS wrote his habilitation thesis on "DNA-Encoded Chemical Library Technology for Drug Discovery” and he is co-founder and organizer of the “International Symposium on DNA-Encoded Chemical Libraries”, a yearly alternating event between ETH Zurich/Switzerland, Boston/US and China. JS is Principal Investigator at ETH Zurich, currently heading a group of 5 PhD students and 1 Postdoc. His main research interests are the development of novel DEL architectures, selection methodologies and the tailored construction of DELs for difficult targets.
Close window LE021 - Innovating DNA-encoded Chemical Library Technology for Better Ligand Discovery
Prof. Roger Schibli is laboratory head in the Biology and Chemistry Department (BIO) and has been a professor at ETH Zurich since 2004. He heads the Center for Radiopharmaceutical Science (CRS), a collaboration between ETH Zurich and the Paul Scherrer Institute. Prof. Schibli studied chemistry at the University of Basel. His early research was devoted to the development of new organometallic complexes of technetium and rhenium for medical applications. He spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Missouri-Columbia before joining to the Paul Scherrer Institute. Prof. Schibli's research is aimed at targeted tumor diagnosis and therapy using radiolabeled compounds. His laboratory focuses on the development of new radionuclides, the identification of novel targeted molecules, and their biological and pharmacological characterization and optimization. CRS conducts "bench-to-bedside" research and can advance novel radiopharmaceutical drug candidates into clinical trials. A 177Lu-labeled peptide developed in his laboratory has been licensed to Debiopham™. In addition, Prof. Schibli is co-founder of the spin-off company ARARIS Biotech, which develops antibody-drug conjugates.
Close window LE099 - Radiotheragnostics from Bench-to-Bedside Virtual Presentation
Dr. Wenqing Shui is currently leading a research group of GPCR Omics & Ligand Discovery at iHuman Institute in ShanghaiTech University as Research Professor and Assistant Director of iHuman Institute. The main research interest of Shui Group is to develop high-throughput affinity MS techniques for the discovery of GPCR ligands with new chemical structures and unique pharmacological properties. In addition, Shui Group has developed experimental and bioinformatics approaches for in-depth transmembrane proteome analysis in tissues to facilitate potential drug target discovery from the GPCR protein superfamily. Her research work has been published in Nature, Nat. Commun., Science Advances, Cell Research, ACS Central Science, etc.
Close window LE037 - Adapting the Affinity MS Technology to GPCR Ligand Discovery Virtual Presentation
Kristian Strømgaard is a Professor of chemical biology at the Center for Biopharmaceuticals, University of Copenhagen. He obtained an MSc degree in Chemical Research from University College London, and continued as a PhD student in medicinal chemistry, part-time at H. Lundbeck. He did a post doc at Columbia University (New York), and shortly after, he was appointed H. Lundbeck Professor at the age of 36 to establish research in Chemical Biology. He won the ‘Teacher of the Year’ award from the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Science (Univ. Cph.) in 2009. In 2012, he co-founded Avilex Pharma, where he has taken the lead compound into clinical development. In 2014, he was appointed Director of Center for Biopharmaceuticals, where he has headed a research center on peptide and protein engineering. Recently, he was visiting professor at Harvard Medical School (Boston) to explore medical research and innovation. In 2021 he was awarded the 2021 University of Copenhagen Innovation Award and appointed Novo Nordisk Foundation Distinguished Innovator.
Close window LE041 - Targeting Protein-Protein Interactions of Receptor Complexes
Dr. Nicolas Thomä was educated at the University of Cambridge, UK, where he received his PhD with Dr. Peter Leadlay in Chemical Biology; followed by postdoctoral work in structural biology in the laboratories of Prof. Roger Goody (Max-Planck-Institute Dortmund, Germany) and Prof. Nikola Pavletich (MSKCC, New York, USA). In 2006 Nicolas became a group leader at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, Switzerland. He was promoted to senior groupleader in 2012. The Thomä lab focuses on the structure and function of the genome maintenance machinery. Recent work from the laboratory in the ubiquitin ligase field illustrated how small molecules induce unexpected neo-morphic interactions between two proteins by acting as molecular glues.
Close window LE002 - Haven't Got a Glue: Protein Surface Variation for the Design of Molecular Glue Degraders
Guy Van den Mooter (°1964) obtained his Ph.D. in 1994 (university of Leuven - KU Leuven, pharmaceutical technology). Following a position as scientist at Janssen Research Foundation (Beerse, Belgium), he obtained a post-doctoral position at the laboratory of Pharmacotechnology and Biopharmacy at the university of Leuven. Since 2009 he is full professor at the faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences in the Drug Delivery and Disposition research group.
The focus of his research group is the formulation, process development and physical chemistry of drug-polymer solid dispersions, nanocrystals, mesoporous drug delivery systems, and colon specific drug delivery. The main objective is to explore the relationship between the formulation, the process applied and the performance in terms of stability and drug release. His research requires the use of processing technologies such as spray drying, hot melt extrusion, fluid bed coating, cryo-grinding, electrospraying, and analytical techniques such as (modulated) differential scanning calorimetry, Dynamic mechanical analysis, X-ray powder diffraction, infrared spectroscopy, laser diffraction, dynamic light scattering, NMR (solution and solid state), and drug release testing.
He has published more than 300 full-length scientific papers in international peer-reviewed journals and several book chapters with ca. 12.000 citations. His H-index = 63 (Web of Science).
In 2007, he co-founded Formac Pharmaceuticals, a spin-out from KULeuven.
Since 2019 he is section editor of the European Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences and editor of Pharmaceutics, Powders, and Molecules.
He is the chair of the subcommission of galenics of the Belgian Pharmacopeia commission and member of the editorial board of several scientific journals.
He is vice dean of the faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences of KU Leuven, responsible for teaching and education.
He teaches courses of pharmaceutical technology, drug delivery, preformulation and physical chemistry in undergraduate and graduate programs. He is coordinator of the master program in industrial pharmacy.
Close window LE068 - Formulation Strategies for Compounds with Challenging Physicochemical Properties
Jarrod is currently an Associate Director in AstraZeneca’s Hit Discovery department with over 20 years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry. He joined AstraZeneca’s High Throughput Screening (HTS) team in 2000 after graduating from the University of Liverpool with a degree in Genetics. During his career he’s remained aligned with early stage drug discovery and primarily hit identification working extensively with screening applications, assay development activities and biophysical technologies. Since 2012 Jarrod focused on devising approaches to identify and eliminate compounds functioning via undesirable mechanisms of action to improve the quality of hit to lead compounds. He now leads a team dedicated to applying biochemical and biophysical screening methodologies.
Close window LE039 - High Throughput Affinity Screening for Rapid Hit Discovery and Prosecuting Intractable Targets
Dingyan Wang is now a Junior Research Fellow at Lingang Laboratory, Shanghai, China. He has just completed his doctor’s degree in drug design at Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences, under the supervision of Prof. Xiaomin Luo, Prof. Mingyue Zheng, and Prof. Hualiang Jiang. His research interests focus on developing in silico tools with advanced AI strategies for assisting drug design and development. His research fields include developing protein-ligand interaction scoring functions, molecular representation strategies, ADME/T modeling approaches, and effective uncertainty quantification strategies for AIDD.
Close window LE076 - Uncertainty Quantification: Considering the Reliability of Artificial Intelligence in Drug Design Virtual Presentation
Daniel Martin Watterson, PhD, is a scientist with over 40 years of experience in industry and academia. His research on the elucidation and molecular characterization of signal transduction pathways, their role in pathophysiology, and development of molecular probes to attenuate pathophysiology progression has generated deliverables with impact on life science research and delivered new therapeutic candidates to clinical development. He is author of over 20 patents relevant to new chemical matter and their use for neurologic and oncology indications and is the recipient of awards and recognition for innovative contributions to new potential disease targets and candidate drugs in multiple disease areas. He currently is the John G. Searle Professor of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at Northwestern University and Professor of Pharmacology at the Feinberg School of Medicine.
Close window LE095 - Beyond Amyloid and Tau: Exploring Alternative Therapeutic Targets Using an Integrative Approach
Dr. Feng ZHU is a tenured full professor of College of Pharmaceutical Sciences in Zhejiang University, China. He is the president of Intelligent Pharmaceutical Sciences Committee of Zhejiang Bioinformatic Society, the editor-in-chief of Elsevier Computers in Biology and Medicine, the vice-president of Youth Analytical Pharmacology Committee of Chinese Pharmacological Society, the members of a variety of committees of many Chinese national research societies. His representative honors and awards include: the Leading Talent of National High-Level Talent Special Support Plan of China (2020), the Honorable Professor of Youth International Recruitment Program of China (2014), the Leading Talent of Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2019), the Laureate of the Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars of Zhejiang province (2021), the last corresponding author of the publications of “Top-100 World-wide Impact” that are reported by Chinese ISTIC (2021), the laureate of the 100,000 Top-scientists of Global Author ID Database (2021, 2022), and the laureate of 100,000 Top-scientists of the Stanford University Science-wide Author Database (2021, 2022).
Prof. ZHU received Ph.D. degree from Department of Pharmacy in National University of Singapore, and his current research interests focused on (1) systematic analysis and discovery of druggability and system profile of therapeutic drug target, (2) construction of methods and tools facilitating novel drug & target discovery, (3) exploration of the mechanism underlying the interaction between drugs and targets. He has published >120 research papers in reputable journals such as Nature Biotechnology, Nature Protocols, Nature Machine Intelligence, Nucleic Acids Research, PNAS, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, and Trends in Pharmacological Sciences. For more information, please visit the official website of his research lab at https://idrblab.org/
Close window LE077 - Innovative Therapeutic Target Discovery based on OMIC Technology and Machine Learning Virtual Presentation Oral Communication
Bauke Albada was born in Sneek, the Netherlands, and studied chemistry in Utrecht. He received his PhD for is work on peptide-based mimics of enzyme active sites in 2009, work performed under supervision of Rob Liskamp. He enriched his expertise with organometallic bioconjugates and DNA nanotechnology during his post-doctoral studies. In 2016 he joined the Laboratory of Organic Chemistry at the Wageningen University, where he currently is assistant professor with a focus on the development of novel methods for the late stage selective modification of proteins. Apart from this, he also developed virtual reality simulations that enable students to assemble glassware needed for Grignard reactions and vacuum distillations. Not only makes this students more prepared when entering the lab, they also are less anxious while being there. He published 80 papers, reviews, and book chapters, and his work is funded by various national and international agencies.
Close window LE012 - Chemical Modification of Wild-type Proteins
After a training in Chemistry at the University of Pisa, Italy, Paola B. Arimondo obtained a PhD in Biophysics at the MNHN, Paris, and a PhD in Chemistry at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. She is research director at the CNRS and head of the Epigenetic Biological Chemistry Unit and the Structural Biology and Chemistry Department of the Institut Pasteur and the CNRS-Institut Pasteur UMR 3523 Chem4Life dedicated to Chemistry for Life. Her research activities are focused on the epigenetic regulation and its targeting with chemical molecules to fight diseases. Her team designs molecules to reprogram cells by mdoulating the aberrant epigenetic landscapes induced by cancers and pathogens during infection. Because of her interest in the development of new drugs, before joining the Institut Pasteur, she directed the Epigenetic Targeting of Cancer (ETaC) unit, a joint public-private laboratory between the CNRS and Pierre Fabre Laboratories, in Toulouse, France.
Close window LE030 - Development of Bisubstrate Inhibitors to Tackle Epigenetics
Giulia Bergonzini is currently an Associate Principal Scientist at Early CVRM Medicinal Chemistry R&D BioPharmaceuticals, AstraZeneca (Sweden) where she focuses on medicinal chemistry and synthetic organic chemistry with a special interest in visible-light photocatalysis and its application to medicinal chemistry projects.
Giulia obtained her BSc and MSc in chemistry from the University of Bologna (Italy) and her PhD in organic chemistry and catalysis at ICIQ-Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (Spain) in 2013 under the supervision of Prof. Paolo Melchiorre. She did a sabbatical at Boston University (USA) under the supervision of Prof. Corey Stephenson and carried out her postdoctoral research at Gothenburg University (Sweden) before joining GSK (UK) as a Process Development Chemist. In 2017 she begun her career at AstraZeneca (Sweden) as a Senior Research Scientist. Current academic collaborations include Prof. Burkhard König (University of Regensburg) and Prof. Belén Martín-Matute (Stockholm University).1,2
1 M. Schmalzbauer et al., Redox-neutral Photocatalytic C–H Carboxylation of Arenes and Styrenes with CO2. Chem 2020, 6, 2658-2672.
2 T. D. Svejstrup et al., Effects of Light Intensity and Reaction Temperature on Photoreactions in Commercial Photoreactors. ChemPhotoChem 2021, 5, 808-814.
Close window LE066 - Visible-light Photocatalysis: a Powerful Tool in the Pursuit of New Pharmaceuticals
Dr. Marco Borgogno is a team leader in discovery chemistry and board member at IAMA Therapeutics. At IAMA he leads the company’s medicinal chemistry programs and advanced preclinical drug-development and manufacturing. Marco obtained a MSc in Medical and Pharmaceutical Biotechnology from the university of Genova. He then obtained a Ph.D. in biotechnological and pharmaceutical sciences from the University of Bologna working in the lab of Dr. Marco De Vivo at IIT Genova, where he discovered a novel class of selective NKCC1 inhibitors for the treatment of Down syndrome and autism. He then pursued its work on CNS drug discovery as a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. De Vivo’s lab, where he was responsible of different projects aiming at the targeting of cation-chloride cotransporters, and delivered several lead compounds for the treatment of different neurological conditions. He then joined IAMA Therapeutics to lead the medicinal chemistry team towards the early and late-stage development of the new compounds to treat autism and other brain disorders.
Close window LE096 - Discovery of Selective NKCC1 Inhibitors for the Treatment of Core Symptoms in Autism, Down Syndrome, and Brain Disorders with Defective NKCC1/KCC2 Ratio
Virgyl Camberlein graduated from the School of Pharmacy in Lille (France) in 2018 and obtained his M.Sc. in Medicinal Chemistry the same year from the University of Lille. He carried out his Master’s research project, in the group of Prof. Dr. Deprez-Poulain (Lille, France), on the design and optimization of Hydroxamic Acid-Based Endoplasmic Reticulum Aminopeptidases (ERAP) inhibitors; the ERAP being zinc-metalloproteases involved in the immune response. Later on, in 2022, he received his Ph.D from the University of Lille and the Saarland University, focusing on the discovery of zinc-metalloproteases inhibitors through protein-templated reactions. He performed the first half of his Ph.D, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Deprez-Poulain in Lille (France), focusing on the discovery of new ERAP inhibitors as immunomodulatory drugs, and the second half, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Hirsch, focusing on the discovery of new Elastase LasB inhibitors as anti-infective drugs; LasB being a key actor in the virulence process of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Currently, he continues as a postdoctoral researcher, in the group of Prof. Dr. Hirsch, with a focus on the design and synthesis of bacterial zinc metalloproteases inhibitors.
Close window LE036 - Discovery of Pseudomonas Aeruginosa Elastase LasB Inhibitors by in Situ Click Chemistry
Laura is a Principal Scientist at Chiesi Farmaceutici. After receiving her Master Degree in Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Technology from the University of Milan in 2005 she moved to the pharmaceutical industry as a researcher at Nicox Research Institute first, where she worked on novel chemical entities with ophthalmic and anti-inflammatory applications, and at Chemo Pharma later, focussing on the route scouting of new chemical processes. She moved to Chiesi in 2010 joining the Medicinal Chemistry Unit. Her current research activities in the field of drug discovery are mainly devoted to the drug design, lead identification and optimization of novel small-molecules to target asthma, COPD, fibrosis and related respiratory disorders. She has been involved in several project teams contributing to the identification of pre-clinical and clinical candidates. Author of peer-reviewed scientific publications and co-inventor of 17 patents.
Close window LE088 - Discovery of Clinical Candidate CHF-6366: a Super-soft Heterobifunctional Muscarinic Antagonist and β2-adrenoceptor Agonist (MABA) for the Inhaled Treatment of Respiratory Diseases
Professor Christina Chai obtained her BSc (Hons) from the University of Canter¬bury, Christchurch, NZ and her PhD from the Australian National University, Canber¬ra. Following her PhD, she was awarded a Samuel and Violette Glasstone Research fellowship at University of Oxford, UK. This was followed by Faculty positions in Victoria University of Wellington, NZ and Aus¬tralian National University, then the Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore as Principal Sci¬entist. She joined the Department of Pharmacy, National University of Singapore in 2011 where she held roles as Deputy Head of Department and Assistant Dean in the Faculty of Science. She is currently the Head of the Department of Pharmacy since Jan 2016. Her research interest is broadly in the area of medicinal chemistry with special interests in natural products as lead compounds for drug development. Currently her research group is focussed on drug development for inflammation and infectious diseases.
Close window LE008 - Tuning the Reactivity of the Natural Product Andrographolide: Towards Targeted Covalent Inhibitors for the Treatment of Inflammation
Bryan Choi is currently a Senior Scientist at Relay Therapeutics’ early research mass spectrometry
group. At Relay, he focuses on early-stage high throughput screening
technologies, and works with a diverse set of mass spectrometry techniques for
the discovery platform. Previously in his career, he’s worked in assay and tech
development to support the advancement of multiple clinical stage drug candidates.
Bryan holds BS and MS degrees from Tufts University in chemical and biomedical
engineering.
Close window LE040 - Accelerating Drug Discovery with the Integration of Affinity Selection Mass Spectrometry (ALIS)
Pr. Deprez-Poulain has an BS in chemistry (Juniata College, PA, USA 1995) an Engineer and a Master Degree (Lille, FR, 1996) in organic chemistry, and a PharmD (Ulille, FR, 2009). She did her PhD under the supervision of Pr Tartar (1996-1999) on combinatorial chemistry applied to lead discovery at the biotech CEREP.SA. She did her postdoc at both the Institut Pasteur de Lille and at the School of Pharmacy and was nominated assistant professor in General Chemistry in 2001 and is, since 2010, Full Professor of Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Discovery at the School of Pharmacy in Lille.
Her research expertise is in the modulation of metalloproteases for therapeutic uses. Her team has contributed in the field by disclosing the first inhibitors of the malarial aminopeptidase PfAM1, the first exosite binders and the first catalytic-site inhibitor of Insulin Degrading Enzyme tested in vivo. and the first plasma-stability study of hydroxamates. Recently her team discovered the first selective ERAP2 inhibitors.
Her recent research interests include the use of kinetic target guided synthesis to identify drug-like inhibitors of metalloenzymes. Since 2021, she coordinates the MSCA-ITN CAPSTONE dedicated on ERAP inhibitors in oncology and autoimmune diseases.
She has published more than 60 papers in peer-reviewed international journals, among which J. Med. Chem, Nat. Comm, and is the inventor of several patents.
Pr Deprez-Poulain has been awarded several Prizes like the joined French Society of Medicinal Chemistry & Servier Prize (2009) “Prix d’Encouragement à la la recherche” or the National Academy of Pharmacy “Michel Delalande Prize in Pharmacochemistry” (2020). Pr Deprez-Poulain has been nominated as a member of the Institut Universitaire de France for 5 years in 2015.
She is also the creator of the mobile application “MedChemStructures Genius”, and the President of the French Medicinal Chemistry Society (2021-2022).
Close window LE094 - First Selective Nanomolar Inhibitors of ERAP2 for Modulation of the Antigen Presentation
Richard is a Lecturer in Chemical Biology within the Leicester Institute of Structural and Chemical Biology and School of Chemistry at the University of Leicester, UK. His research is focussed on the application of chemical synthesis and chemical biology approaches for the development of novel pharmaceutical modalities. In particular, his group has a keen interest in the discovery, design and evaluation of molecular glues. Prior to joining the University of Leicester Richard held a Marie Curie fellowship at the Eindhoven University of Technology (NL) and undertook a post-doctoral research project at the University of Leeds (UK).
Close window LE032 - Molecular Glues for the 14-3-3 Interactome
Karl Gademann (1972) was educated at ETH Zürich and Harvard University, where he worked with Prof. Dieter Seebach, Prof. Eric N. Jacobsen, and Prof. Erick M. Carreira. His previous professorial appointments include the EPFL in Lausanne and the University of Basel, where he served as full professor and dean of research. He just completed his term as the department chair of the department of chemistry and is a member of the research council of the Swiss National Science Foundation.
His work has been recognized by a number of international awards, including the Latsis prize, the Novartis Early Career Award, the Ruzicka Medal, The Liebig Lecture by the German Chemical Society, and the European Young Investigator Award. He delivered the Novartis Chemistry Lecture at the University of Illinois in 2016. In summer 2020, he was named as a Fellow of Chemistry Europe.
Close window LE007 - Reduce to the Max: Functionally Optimized Natural Products via Chemical Synthesis
Hervé Geneste earned his doctoral degree from the University of Lausanne (with Prof. M. Schlosser). After a postdoc at Zurich University, he joined BASF (drug discovery). He is now Principal Research Scientist and team leader (AbbVie, Germany) with 20+ years’ experience in medchem & neuroscience. Hervé has a proven track record up to clinical candidates: key contribution to ABT-614 (Ph1, dopamine D3 antagonist), ABT-436 (Ph2, V1b antagonist). He has served as target champion & co-leader of international project teams (schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis). He is inventor of 61 published patents and author of 26 peer-reviewed articles or reviews. Hervé has a passion for new technologies, teaching (lecturer, Montpellier) and green chemistry. He has initiated a global effort investigating the potential of mechanochemistry for AbbVie portfolio products and he´s leading a cross-functional team aiming at in silico prediction of brain penetration (machine learning).
Close window LE079 - In Silico Prediction of Brain Penetration - High Accuracy Achieved
Francesco Greco obtained his master degree in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Technologies in 2014 and his PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences in 2018 at the University of Perugia, Italy. During his academic experience, he worked both in wet lab developing new binding assay as well as on using edge computational methods in order to identify novel ligands for potential drug targets in immuno-oncology. Currently, Francesco Greco is Senior Research Scientist in Computational Medicinal Chemistry at Tes Pharma (Perugia, Italy). He works on the identification and development of small molecules that target orphan nuclear receptors to unveil novel therapies for high unmet medical needs, with a particular focus on new immuno-oncology approaches, as the one he will present today.
Close window LE063 - NR2F6 Antagonists: in Vitro Pharmacology and Preclinical Data of a Potential Next Generation Immuno-oncology Therapy
Gilles Guichard (born 1969) received his PhD from the University of Strasbourg (1996) in the field of peptide science and in 1997 moved to ETH in Zürich as a post-doctoral researcher working with Prof. Dieter Seebach on the chemistry of β-peptide foldamers. In 1998, he joined the Institut de Biologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire (IBMC) in Strasbourg as a CNRS Chargé de Recherche and was appointed CNRS Directeur de Recherches in 2006. In 2009, he moved to the Institut Européen de Chimie et Biologie (IECB) in Bordeaux as a new group leader. Since 2019, he also serves as the dean of the Department of Health Sciences and Technology at the University of Bordeaux. In 2019, he received the Grammaticakis-Neuman award from the French Académie des Sciences for his work on foldamers and the DCO-SCF Prize in 2021.
His research focuses on biomimetic chemistry of peptides and foldamer chemistry. In recent years, his group has gained interest in protein mimicry and in the structure-guided design of modulators of protein-protein interactions.
Close window LE090 - Structure-Guided Design of Foldamer-Based Inhibitors of Protein-Protein Interactions
Thomas Hayhow began his chemistry career doing undergraduate studies at the University of York before joining GSK as a medicinal chemist. He spent almost 15 years across various sites and disease areas before eventually ending up at the Stevenage site in the epigenetics field focussing on developing treatments for immuno-inflammatory diseases. While working on drugging epigenetic targets he undertook a PhD in collaboration with the University of Strathclyde under the tutelage of Dr. Philip Humphreys and Prof. Colin Suckling. He joined AstraZeneca in 2016 as part of their Oncology Chemistry department and is an associate principle scientist concentrating on targets for protein degradation since 2017.
Close window LE004 - Discovery And Profiling of AZ'6421: an Oral ERa-Protac with an in vitro-in vivo Disconnect
Timo Heinrich did his chemistry studies at the Goethe university in Frankfurt/Main from 1992 until 1998. In his PhD thesis under the supervision of Prof. Michael Reggelin he investigated the application of chiral sulfoximines in the asymmetric synthesis of Neurkinine antagonists. From 1998 until 2001 he worked with Solvay Pharmaceuticals in Hannover. There, ‘orphan-receptors‘ and cardio-vascular targets were in focus. During a research stay at Cadus Pharmaceutical in Tarrytown, NY, he optimized the synthesis of an adenosine A1-antagonist which was developed as SLV320 – Derenofylline up to clinical phase II. Since 2001 he is working with Merck KGaA in Darmstadt. First, he supported CNS projects like the 5-HT2A-antagonist Pruvanserin and the anti-depressant Vilazodon with metabolite syntheses. In recent years, targets from oncologic indications were progressed. His MetAP2 inhibitor M8891 was well tolerated in clinical Phase I testing and out licensed to Cureteq for further development. To support target research, he contributed significantly to the discovery and submission of probe molecules like the selective lactate transporter MCT4 inhibitor MSC-4381 and kinase SRPK inhibitor MSC-1186 to the Structural Genomics Consortium. Most recent activities were focused on Hippo pathway modulators like MSC-4106
Close window LE070 - Optimization of TEAD P-Site Binding Fragment Hit into In Vivo Active Lead MSC-4106
Founding Scientist, Vernalis and Emeritus Professor, University of York
Rod Hubbard has been working with methods for analysis and exploitation of protein structure for over 40 years. Apart from brief spells at Harvard (with Martin Karplus), he has spent his academic career at York. In the 1980s, he was a pioneer in the development of molecular graphics and modelling methods that were commercialized by Accelrys. In the 1990s, he collaborated with many pharmaceutical companies on the structure of important drug targets while developing new ideas in how to use structural information in drug discovery. Since 2001 he has divided his time between structure and fragment-based methods for chemical biology at York and innovation in drug discovery research at Vernalis, where his current main role is initiation and coordination of external research collaborations.
Close window LE024 - Photoactivated Covalent Capture of DNA-encoded Fragments to Identify Ligands for Challenging Targets
Soufyan obtained his engineering diploma and master’s degree in chemistry from the University of Rennes in 2015. Then, he graduated Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Strasbourg in 2018 under the supervision of Prof Colobert and Dr Djukic. During his Ph.D. studies, he used chiral sulfoxides moieties to develop new strategies for the asymmetric C(sp3)-H bond activation. Then, he joined Janssen in 2019 as Scientist in the Discovery Chemistry department. He initially worked in the oncology field where he assumed responsibility for a subseries in the MCL1 inhibitor program and more recently became Senior Scientist co-leading a project in the neuroscience space. He’s also involved in the CHAIR, a Marie Curie funded ITN project gathering leading R&D laboratories from academia and industry for which the main objectives are developing novel, safe and efficient C-H activation methods as well as training the next generation of organic chemists. Soufyan is co-author of 9 peer-reviewed papers and 2 patents.
Close window LE089 - Discovery of JNJ-1245, a Novel and Potent Fluoroallylamide Mcl-1 Inhibitor for the Treatment of Hematologic Malignancies
Dr. Manuela Jörg is a Monash and Newcastle University Research Fellow who develops pharmacological tools and small-molecule drugs to support drug discovery research. She obtained a PhD in Medicinal Chemistry from Monash University, in addition to a Bachelor and Masters in Chemistry at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland and the University of Basel, respectively. Prior to her academic career, she completed an apprenticeship as a chemical lab-technician and has experience working in industrial and government organisations.
Close window LE031 - Identification and Structure-activity Relationship Profiling of Positive Allosteric Modulators Targeting Muscarinic Acetylcholine Receptors
Anna Junker received a PhD degree in 2013 from the Institute of Pharmaceutical and Medicinal Chemistry at Münster University (Germany) under the supervision of Prof. Dr. B Wünsch. During her PhD thesis, she also joined the group of Prof. Dr. K. Itami at the Nagoya University (Japan) for a period of eight months, developing new methods for Ir-catalysed late-stage C-H functionalization reactions. After finishing her Ph.D., she joined the group of Prof. Dr. C. E. Müller at Bonn University (Germany) as a postdoctoral fellow, and after that, the lab of Prof. D. K. A. Jacobson at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, MD (USA). Returning back to Germany, she started her independent career as a ‚Cells-in-Motion‘ cluster of excellence-funded postdoctoral fellow and subsequently, starting in 2018, she has built her own group as an Emmy-Noether program-funded research group leader. She is a medicinal chemist working on the development of novel ligands for diagnostic and therapeutic applications in the fields of cancer, inflammation and neuropathic pain. She develops molecular imaging probes for studying biological processes in vitro and in vivo and combines the imaging probes with targeted-drug delivery approaches to enhance the effective concentration of the probe at the site of interest and hereby improve image contrast and therapeutic efficacy.
Close window LE102 - Development of First PET Tracers for the Imaging of CD73 Expression in Triple-negative Breast Cancer
Elizabeth Lopes obtained her Bachelor's in chemistry from the University of Porto in 2014 and received her M. Sci. from the New University of Lisbon in 2017. Her M. Sci. project was developed at the Research Institute for Medicines (iMed.ULisboa) under the supervision of Prof. Maria M. M. Santos and was focused on the development of spirooxindole-based reactivators of the p53 protein. After the M. Sci., E. Lopes developed a project for Hovione Farmaciência SA. (Portugal) and in 2018, she started a PhD in Pharmacy at the University of Lisbon under the supervision of Prof. Maria M. M. Santos (University of Lisbon, Portugal) and Professors Maurizio Botta/Mattia Mori (University of Siena, Italy). Her PhD project focuses on in silico design, and synthesis of new p53 reactivators for evaluation of their effect on cancer and malaria and was already recognized by several prizes, and grants such as best poster award at 5th MC/WG Meeting Cost Action CM1407, best flash presentation award at Bio.Natural Meeting and Cost Action CM1407 STSM grant.
Close window LE069 - Dual Inhibition of P53-MDM2/4 Interactions With Spiropyrazoline Oxindoles
Katherine began her chemistry career at the University of Oxford, where she received her MChem degree in 2018. She undertook her Master’s project in Dr Christiane Timmel’s group, focusing on the spin chemistry of flavoproteins and the implications for animal migration. She then began her doctoral work with the GSK/University of Strathclyde Collaborative PhD Programme, working in medicinal chemistry. Her project focused on early stage drug development, specifically new modalities involving bifunctional small molecules, including Antibody Recruiting Molecules (ARMs) and Lysosome Targeting Chimeras (LYTACs).
Close window LE023 - Exploiting DNA-encoded Library Technology for the Discovery of Novel Antibody Recruiting Molecules Against LOX-1
Dr Maria Maneiro did her PhD in Organic Chemistry at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, under the supervision of Prof. Concepción González-Bello. During her PhD, she worked on the design, synthesis, and biological evaluation of new inhibitors of enzymes involved in metabolism, virulence, and resistance mechanisms of bacteria for the treatment of multi-resistant bacterial infections. After obtaining her PhD degree, in 2018 she joined the group of Prof. Ed Tate at Imperial College London as postdoctoral fellow working on the field of Targeted Protein Degradation. Since April 2021 she is a postdoctoral fellow in González-Bello’s group where she is currently working on the development of innovative approaches to combat bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
Close window LE003 - Antibody-Protac Conjugates: an Approach for Targeted Selective BRD4 Degradation in HER2+ Phenotypes
Dr. Ana Martinez is Research Professor at the Biological Research Center (CIB) of Spanish National Council for Research (CSIC). Her interest is focused on neurodegenerative disorders, leading numerous research projects on the medicinal chemistry and rational drug design of new drugs for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, spinal cord trauma and multiple sclerosis. Her research is in close contact with biopharmaceutical companies for technology transfer. Since February 2002 till January 2008, she was R&D Director of NeuroPharma, after called NOSCIRA. During this period, two of her research projects reached clinical trials as disease modifying agents for Alzheimer's disease. In 2008, she returned to her academic laboratory where several projects have been developed in a private-public environment. She is author of more than a three hundred scientific publications, more than fourty active patents in the field and editor of several books. She acts as scientific advisory board for several SMEs in the biotech field and she is founder of ANKAR PHARMA, which goal is full the gap between basic drug discovery research and clinical trials for neurodegenerative diseases.
Close window LE098 - Modulation of TDP-43-pathy by Brain Penetrant Protein Kinase Inhibitors, a New Hope for ALS and Related Disorders
Dr Exequiel Porta (EP) is a PhD in Chemical Sciences (Best GPA and best Argentinian thesis awarded), MSc in Biotechnology (1st class, Rosario National University, Argentina). In 2018 EP was granted the Durham International Junior Research Fellowship (COFUNDed between Durham University and the European Union - Marie Curie Actions) for a research position at Durham University (United Kingdom). EP's area of expertise includes medicinal chemistry, organic synthesis, biotechnology, bioinformatics, parasitology (particularly directed in neglected tropical diseases), and chemical biology. EP have generated a toolbox of Serine and Kinases activity- and affinity- based probes to identify and validate new drug targets in Leishmania spp to provide a general resource that will underpin efficient drug discovery programmes. EP is member of the Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the American Society of Chemistry (division of medicinal chemistry).
Close window LE083 - Mining the Leishmania Kinome
Filipa Ramilo-Gomes, PharmD, is currently PhD candidate at University of Lisbon (PT). Her PhD project focuses on Epigenetic Drug Development, in the area of Oncology/Hematology. During her PhD she conducted research at Inte:Ligand company (AT), University of Vienna (AT) and Fraunhofer Institute (DE). She joined F. Hoffmann-La Roche (CH) in 2021 to work in Neuroscience and Rare Diseases at Pharma Research and Early Development Unit.
Close window LE015 - New Generation of EZH2 Inhibitors for Cancer Therapy: A Computer-Aided Drug Design Approach in Epigenetics
Stefano Sainas is Post-Doc of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Torino. After the degree in Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Technology in 2013, he gained his PhD in the laboratory of Prof. Lolli in 2017. During the PhD, he joined the group of Prof. Frølund at University of Copenhagen, (Denmark) and of Prof. Guedes (Faculdade de Farmácia - Universidade de Lisboa) as visiting scientist. His research is focused on the field of drug discovery, bioisosterism, heterocyclic chemistry and fluorescent probes. He has recently co-founded Drug Discovery and Clinic s.r.l, a spin-off company committed to the development of DHODH inhibitors, for the treatment of cancer.
Close window LE087 - Human Dihydroorotate Dehydrogenase Inhibitor MEDS443: a Magic Bullet Against Coronaviruses
Matthew Segall is CEO of Optibrium. He has an MSc in Computation from the University of Oxford and a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Cambridge. Since 2001, Matthew has led teams developing predictive models and intuitive decision-support and visualization tools for drug discovery. Matt has published over 40 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters on computational chemistry, cheminformatics and drug discovery. In 2009 he led a management buyout of the StarDrop™ business to found Optibrium, which develops novel technologies and ground-breaking AI software and services, including Cerella™ and Inspyra™, that improve the efficiency and productivity of drug discovery.
Close window LE052 - Using AI to Derive Valuable Insights from Drug Discovery Data
Alice Sosic is Assistant Professor at the Department of Pharmaceutical and Pharmacological Sciences at the University of Padova. She studied Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Technologies at the University of Padova, where she earned her PhD in Molecular Sciences in 2013. She is a medicinal chemist highly specialized in drug development and in the evaluation of drugs molecular mechanisms of action. Her research has been mainly focused on the study of Nucleic Acids, especially RNA, representing a valid target for new antiviral and anticancer agents. In 2016, she was awarded with a MSCA Individual Fellowship at The RNA Institute (SUNY Albany, NY, USA) that allowed her to obtain wide and distinctive expertise in the using of Mass Spectrometry for the investigation of RNA structures, structure-function relationships of RNA-ligands and RNA-protein complexes involved in the lifecycle of viruses.
Close window LE075 - Bis-3-chloropiperidines Targeting TAR RNA as a Novel Strategy to Impair the HIV-1 Nucleocapsid Protein
Dr Léopold Thabault obtained his master’s degree in pharmacy at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) in 2016. He was then granted an FNRS Research Fellow fellowship and started a doctorate in the laboratories of Pr. Raphaël Frédérick (Louvain Drug Research Institute) and Pr. Pierre Sonveaux (Institut de Recherche Expérimentale et Clinique). During his Ph.D., he studied lactate dehydrogenase and developed peptide tools capable of modulating its tetramerization process. After obtaining his doctoral degree in 2020, he joined the group of Dr. Max Douglas at the Institute of Cancer Research in London to work on cross-talks of heteromeric complexes involved in DNA replication. In September 2022, he will start a new position at Galàpagos (Mechelen, Belgium) as a scientist specialist in biophysics.
Close window LE044 - Interrogating Lactate Dehydrogenases Oligomeric Interfaces Using (Stapled) Peptides And Small Molecules
Former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, Boris Vauzeilles prepared his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Pierre Sinaÿ in the Chemistry Department of this institution. He then joined Prof. Julius Rebek, Jr. at MIT (Cambridge, Massachussets), for a post-doctoral experience. The group soon moved to the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, where Julius Rebek was promoted as Director of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology. Boris Vauzeilles then returned to France as a CNRS researcher (Institut de Chimie Moléculaire et des Matériaux d’Orsay, Université Paris-Saclay), and in 2012 he created, in parallel with his research in Orsay, a new team at the Institut de Chimie des Substances Naturelles in Gif-sur-Yvette, where he initiated in 2015 the Department of Chemical Biology. He is also the co-founder of a startup company, Diamidex, and was awarded, together with his group, the Prix La Recherche in 2015. His research is mainly focused on the use of synthetic chemistry to develop molecular tools designed to probe biological processes. Mainly educated as a synthetic glycochemist, he evolved towards the development of eco-friendly chemistry starting from biomass, design and synthesis of molecular devices for artificial photosynthetic systems for energy conversion, in vivo chemistry with the metabolic labeling of living bacterial lipopolysaccharides, and the development of new molecular probes for reactive oxygen species. Since early 2020, he is the Director of Institut de Chimie des Substances Naturelles (ICSN) and President of SCF-ChemBio, the new Chemical Biology Group from the French Chemical Society. SCF-ChemBio joined the European Federation for Medicinal chemistry and Chemical biology (EFMC).
Close window LE059 - Fast Detection and Imaging of Hydrogen Peroxide with New Borinic Probes
As a Director Medicinal Chemistry at Symeres, I am currently responsible for the leading of 5 different customer-oriented drug discovery projects. These projects vary from Lead Finding to Lead Optimization with the aim to deliver a preclinical candidate and consist of 2-10 chemists, in total about 30 chemists. The projects vary in the targets and disease areas, covering pain, inflammation, cancer, and anti-infectives. Analyzing biological data, establishing structure activity relationships and structure property relationships belong to my daily work. I started my career in 2006 with a PhD in Organic Chemistry from the University of Rostock in Germany. After a PostDoc at DSM-Nutritional Products AG, Switzerland in Process Research and a PostDoc at Merck KGaA, Germany in the synthesis of fluorinated building blocks and natural product analogues, I joined in 2008 the Grünenthal GmbH, Germany as a Project lead and laboratory head Medicinal Chemistry. Since 2014 I am working for Symeres, former Mercachem.
Close window LE071 - A New Dual Mode of Action to Treat Pain - From Scratch to Pre-Clinical Candidate
Erik Weis received his B.Sc. in biochemistry from the Masaryk University, Czechia, and M.Sc. in chemistry from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. After this he joined the group of Prof. Belén Martín-Matute in collaboration with Dr. Magnus Johansson at AstraZeneca Gothenburg, obtaining a PhD in organic chemistry in 2022. His PhD work focused on the development of C-H activation methodologies for late-stage functionalization of pharmaceuticals and application of high-throughput experimentation techniques. Erik currently holds a position as Senior Scientist in Medicinal Chemistry within Research and Early Development, Cardiovascular, Renal and Metabolism (CVRM), BioPharmaceuticals R&D at AstraZeneca, Gothenburg, Sweden. His research interests are focused around drug discovery and high-throughput experimentation for reaction discovery and optimization.
Close window LE067 - Iridium-catalyzed C-H Activation Methods for Late-stage Functionalization of Pharmaceuticals
Jukka Westermarck (MD, PhD) is a Professor of Cancer Biology at the Institute of Biomedicine, University of Turku and a Research Director in the Turku Bioscience Centre at University of Turku, Finland.
Westermarck earned his medical degree in 1996, and his PhD degree in 1998 from University of Turku. He was working as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dirk Bohmann during 1999-2001 in the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany. After being appointed as Academy Fellow by the Academy of Finland, he established his own research group at Turku Centre for Biotechnology in 2002. 2009 he was appointed to his current positions at the university of Turku.
Professor Westermarck is one of the international leaders of the phosphatase field. The work of Westermarck laboratory focuses on role and regulation of phosphatases, particularly tumor suppressor protein phosphatase 2A (PP2A) in human cancers. Based on this work his group has identified several novel signaling principles how PP2A regulates cancer progression, as well as potential novel cancer therapy targets and diagnostic biomarkers.
Close window LE082 - Protein Phosphatase 2A, a Druggable Tumor Suppressor for Cancer Therapy
Birgit Wilding is a Scientific Director in the Medicinal Chemistry Department at Boehringer Ingelheim in Vienna, Austria. Since joining Boehringer Ingelheim in 2018, Birgit has led and impacted several drug discovery programmes in oncology research, and successfully delivered development candidates.
Birgit obtained her PhD in organic synthesis and biocatalysis at Graz University of Technology, in collaboration with the Austrian Centre of Industrial Biocatalysis (acib), followed by a position as postdoctoral researcher at acib. She then moved to the CRUK Drug Discovery Unit at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, UK as Postdoctoral Fellow in Synthetic Medicinal Chemistry. As medicinal chemist, Birgit has worked across modalities, including small molecule reversible and covalent inhibitors, as well as degraders, in early as well as late-stage projects. At both, the Institute of Cancer Research and Boehringer Ingelheim, Birgit contributed to drug discovery programmes which resulted in compounds now investigated in clinical trials.
Close window LE048 - Discovery of Novel Covalent, EGFR WT Sparing, HER2 Selective Inhibitors for the Treatment of Her2 Exon 20 Insertion Driven Tumours First Time Disclosures
Sophie joined GlaxoSmithKline Stevenage in 2006, following her graduation from École Supérieure de Chimie Physique Électronique in Lyon, France with a Masters degree in Chemical Sciences and Engineering. For the past 16 years, Sophie has worked on a variety of targets across multiple disease areas (anti-bacterial, CNS and respiratory diseases), from fragment-based drug discovery approaches all the way to late lead optimisation. In 2011, she entered the GSK/Strathclyde PhD programme under the supervision of Dr Craig Jamieson, from which she graduated in 2015. She led the PI4KB medicinal chemistry team that delivered a first in class inhaled clinical candidate for the prevention of rhinoviral-driven exacerbations in respiratory diseases. Currently, Sophie is a team leader in the Medicinal Chemistry department, where she is guiding medicinal chemistry efforts to discover clinical candidates.
Close window LE055 - Discovery and Optimisation of Potent, Slow-dissociating Inhaled PI4KB Inhibitors
Kenneth received his PhD 1991 based on studies of preparative and mechanistic aspects of palladium catalyzed oxidations and nucleophilic substitution reactions at Uppsala University under prof Jan-Erling Bäckvall’s supervision and did a preDoc 1990 in prof Lanny Libeskind’s group at Emory University on quinone synthesis. He joined Hässle (Astra) in 1991 as an organic chemist in the gastrointestinal chemistry department and has since held positions as team and preclinical drug project leader at AstraZeneca. In his current role a principal scientist within the Early Cardiovascular Renal & Metabolism area in the BioPharmaceuticals R&D unit, focus is on driving synthesis and medicinal chemistry progress in drug projects towards candidate drug selection but also to support the selection of new cardiovascular drug projects and follow advances in chemical toxicology.
Close window LE028 - Discovery of AZD5462, an Oral Agonist of the Relaxin Family Peptide Receptor 1 (RXFP1) for the Treatment of Cardiorenal Disease
Uwe Grether received his Diploma degree in Chemistry at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, where he subsequently earned his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry with Professor Herbert Waldmann in 2000. After that, he joined Professor James D. White’s group at Oregon State University for his postdoctoral research. In 2001, Dr. Grether started at the Pharma Research and Early Development unit of F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. in Basel, Switzerland. He has a long standing professional experience as project team leader in drug discovery and development reaching advanced stages up to phase 3 clinical trials with multiple new molecular entities. Dr. Grether has profound knowledge on different target classes, a broad variety of indications, chemical biology, and expertise in due diligences. He has led academic as well as industrial external collaborations and is an intrapreneur of novel technologies for project and platform applications. Dr. Grether is co-author of more than 140 patents, research publications and book chapters. His research interests include medicinal chemistry, late stage functionalization and chemical probes focusing on holistic approaches toward a clinical end-goal.
Close window LE054 - First Disclosure of Cannabinoid Receptor Type 2 Agonist Rg7774 – An Innovative Oral Treatment for Diabetic Retinopathy
Dr. Peter Haebel works on the discovery of peptide therapeutics in the cardiometabolic field at Boehringer Ingelheim, where he is senior project lead in the Medicinal Chemistry department.
Peter studied chemistry at the University of Freiburg and obtained a PhD in protein crystallography at the University of Auckland. After postdoc projects in structural biology and molecular modelling at the ETH Zurich and the University of Marburg, Peter moved into industry. He joined the chemoinformatics team of Boehringer Ingelheim in 2007 and was leading a computational chemistry team before taking up his new position in medicinal chemistry.
His research interests include therapeutic peptides and open innovation.
Close window LE027 - Discovery of BI 456906, a Novel Long-acting GCG/GLP-1 Receptor Dual Agonist for the Treatment of Patients With Obesity
Session Chair
Session Chair
Roland Pfau studied chemistry in Mainz and Irvine (California), and got his PhD in the group of Prof. Horst Kunz (Mainz) working in the field of carbohydrate chemistry.
He joined Boehringer Ingelheim 2002 as Labhead, advancing to Research Project Leader in 2005 and now fills a position as Senior Project Leader in CNS.
His research experiences and interests within CNS cover pain research, neurodegenerative diseases and psychiatric indications.
He contributed to 6 candidates entering development, 2 of which are currently pursued in clinical stages.
Here, the research story of the collaboration project with Gesyntha in Sweden behind the current clinical mPGES1 inhibitor BI01029539 will be presented, including first time disclosure of its structure.
Close window LE053 - mPGES1 Inhibitors: First Time Disclosure of Clinical Candidate BI01029539 / GS-248
Dr. Kai Schiemann is Principal Scientist in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at Merck Healthcare KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. He studied chemistry at the university of Göttingen and received his PhD in Organic Chemistry under the supervision of Professor Tietze in 1995. Prior to moving into drug discovery at Merck in Darmstadt in 1999, he completed postdoctoral studies on natural product synthesis at the University of Santa Cruz (Prof. Konopelski) and joined Parke Davis, division of Warner Lambert (now part of Pfizer) for 2 years in Ann Arbor Michigan in the MedChem and Combinatorial chemistry departments.
Over the past years his research has focused on the identification and development of small molecules on various target classes in oncology and immuno-oncology. In the discovery of M1069, which entered clinical phase I in 2022, he was co-project leader also leading the design and optimization of the clinical candidate in the preclinical phase.
Track record
• 28 publications (incl. lectures and posters)
• 78 patents
25 years of experience in drug research
Close window LE026 - First-time Disclosure of M1069, a Highly Selective Dual Inhibitor of Adenosine A2a/A2b Receptors With Improved Therapeutic Activity Compared to A2a Receptor Selective Antagonists
Dr. Mikhail Zibinsky is a Director of Chemistry at RAPT Therapeutics, South San Francisco. In his decade long career in pharmaceutical industry Dr. Zibinsky successfully advanced several candidates to the clinic, all of which are currently in Phase 2/Phase 3 clinical studies in various indications. Prior to RAPT Therapeutics, Dr. Zibinsky was at Flexus Biosciences, which was acquired by Bristol Myers Squibb in 2014 for its IDO1 program. Dr. Zibinsky holds Ph.D. degree in chemistry from the University of Southern California and is an author and inventor on numerous patents and scientific publications.
Close window LE103 - Discovery of a Selective Oral CCR4 Antagonist RPT193 for Treatment of Atopic Dermatitis and other Allergic Disorders EFMC Prizes for Young Medicinal Chemist or Chemical Biologist in Academia and in Industry
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