Bi-weekly: Thursdays, 12 pm EDT/EST, 9 am PT/PST, 5 pm BST/BDT, 6 pm CEST/CET
https://dfci.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_m7JJaw52T8yZYt8-ykL6UQ
Some seminars were recorded and accessible for a limited time on our youtube channel.
Upcoming Speakers
March 6th, 2025
Host: Katherine Donovan
Jian Jin
Mount Sinai
Discovery of Novel Degraders and Development of New Approaches to Target Undruggable Proteins
Dr. Jian Jin is an internationally recognized medicinal chemist and chemical biologist with more than 25 years of experience in small-molecule drug discovery. He is currently the Mount Sinai Endowed Professor in Therapeutics Discovery and Director of the Mount Sinai Center for Therapeutics Discovery at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (Mount Sinai). Dr. Jin is also a tenured Full Professor in Departments of Pharmacological Sciences, Oncological Sciences and Neuroscience, and a Co-Leader of the Cancer Clinical Investigation Program at the Tisch Cancer Institute (TCI) at Mount Sinai. Dr. Jin’s laboratory is a leader in discovering selective inhibitors of histone methyltransferases, biased ligands of G protein-coupled receptors, and novel degraders targeting oncoproteins. In particular, Dr. Jin’s lab has made seminal contributions to discovery of novel small-molecule degraders and development of new technologies for advancing the targerd protein degradation (TPD), targerd protein stabilization (TPS) and targerd protein acetylation (TPA) field. As the Director of the Mount Sinai Center for Therapeutics Discovery and a Co-Leader of the Cancer Clinical Investigation Program at the TCI, Dr. Jin is leading Mount Sinai’s efforts on discovering novel therapeutics for the treatment of human diseases including cancer.
Dr. Jin received a Bachelor’s of Science degree in chemistry from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1991 and a PhD in organic chemistry from the Pennsylvania State University in 1997, and completed a post-doctoral training at the Ohio State University. Dr. Jin joined GlaxoSmithKline as a medicinal chemist in 1998 and had been a manager of medicinal chemistry from 2003 to 2008. In 2008, Dr. Jin joined the Division of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) as an Associate Professor. He had also served as an Associate Director of Medicinal Chemistry in the Center for Integrative Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery at UNC from 2008 to 2014. Dr. Jin was recruited to Mount Sinai as a Full Professor with tenure in 2014.
Dr. Jin has published >250 peer-reviewed papers and is an inventor of >80 issued U.S. patents and published patent applications. In particular, Dr. Jin is one of several inventors of Daprodustat, a hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF) prolyl hydroxylase small-molecule inhibitor, which has been approved in the United States and Japan as an oral medication for the treatment of anemia caused by chronic kidney disease. Dr. Jin has been inducted to the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) as an 2022 NAI Fellow.
March 20th, 2025
Host: Zuzanna Kozicka
Martin Schwalm
SGC
Targeted Protein Degradation as a tool to study UPS pathway inhibitors
Dr. Martin Schwalm studied Biosciences and Biotechnology at the University of Frankfurt with a focus on enzyme engineering. For his MSc he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg in the group of Leibnitz Prize winner Prof. Tobias Erb. His work focused on synthetic biology and metabolic engineering for the generation of autotrophic bacterial strains as a basis for long-term directed evolution. In 2020, he joined the SGC Frankfurt and the group of Prof. Stefan Knapp as a PhD student focusing on the development of novel protein degraders and the design and establishment of in vitro and cellular assay systems for degrader profiling and characterisation. In 2023 he founded tracerdb.org, a crowdsourced database of experimentally validated tracers. Since 2024 he is a postdoctoral scientist within the SGC focusing on the development of novel small molecule drug modalities.
Dean Clift
TRIMTECH Therapeutics
Harnessing TRIM21 mechanism for selective degradation of proteopathic aggregates
Dean Clift is currently Head of Exploratory Biology at TRIMTECH Therapeutics. Dean obtained his PhD from the University of Edinburgh. During his postdoc with Melina Schuh at the LMB in Cambridge UK he invented Trim-AwayTM technology, which utilizes off-the-shelf antibodies and the natural function of intracellular antibody receptor and E3 ubiquitin ligase TRIM21 to rapidly degrade endogenous cellular proteins. Dean remained at the LMB to work with Leo James to elucidate the mechanism of TRIM21 activation, before moving to TRIMTECH to exploit this mechanism to develop new therapeutics that selectively degrade pathogenic protein aggregates.
April 3rd, 2025
Host: Katherine Donovan / Mikołaj Słabicki
Peng Chen
Peking University
Targeted Protein Degradation in the Transmembrane and Extracellular Space
Dr. Peng Chen is the Boya Distinguished Professor and Chair of Chemical Biology at Peking University, Senior Investigator at Shenzhen Bay Laboratory, and the New Cornerstone Investigator from the New Cornerstone Foundation. Before joining Peking University in 2009, he obtained Ph.D with Prof. Chuan He at The University of Chicago and finished postdoctoral training with Prof. Peter Schultz at The Scripps Research Institute. He is currently also the Director of Chemical Biology Division at Chinese Chemical Society and the Executive Editor at ACS Chemical Biology.
His group is interested in developing and applying new chemistry tools to investigate protein-based interactions and activities in living systems. He has been leading the development of bioorthogonal cleavage reactions, which has enabled the gain-of-function study of proteins as well as other biomolecules in living cells and animals. This has created a new direction in bioorthogonal chemistry with broad utilities in life sciences and medicine. He is also interested in developing cutting-edge technology for membrane protein degradation.
Chase Suiter
University of Washington
Combinatorial mapping of E3 ubiquitin ligases to their target substrates
Chase Suiter is a graduate student in Dr. Jay Shendure’s lab at the University of Washington, where he develops technologies to study the regulation of protein degradation. As part of his graduate work, he created COMET, a high-throughput method for identifying E3 ubiquitin ligase substrates, which also incorporates a systematic evaluation of computational protein structure prediction for E3-substrate interactions. His research has been supported by an NIH NHLBI F31 Award. Prior to graduate school, Chase worked as a research technician in Dr. Jun J. Yang’s lab at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Mississippi.
April 17th, 2025
Host: Shourya S Roy Burman / Zuzanna Kozicka
Charlotte Crowe
Peking University
Mechanisms of degrader-targeted protein ubiquitinability
Dr Charlotte Crowe is a postdoctoral researcher in Alessio Ciulli’s laboratory at the Centre for Targeted Protein Degradation (CeTPD) at the University of Dundee. She is originally from Strasbourg, France. She moved to Scotland in 2015 to study an MChem in Chemistry at the University of St Andrews, graduating with Honours in 2020. Her PhD, focusing on using chemical, structural and biophysical approaches to understand the mechanism of action of small molecule degraders in Targeted Protein Degradation (TPD), with a particular focus on Cullin RING E3 ligases, was supervised by Professor Alessio Ciulli and Professor Ron Hay at the University of Dundee, and Dr Hannah Maple from Tocris, Bio-Techne. In 2024, she joined the Ciulli lab as a postdoctoral researcher, and from January 2025 she has been working in the CeTPD LITE project team with the Michael J. Fox Foundation developing degraders to tackle Parkinson’s disease.
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