Previous Speakers (2024 part 1)
Some seminars were recorded and accessible for a limited time on our youtube channel.
January 11th, 2024
Host: Katherine Donovan
Positive Selection Screening for Natural Product Degraders of Undruggable Targets in Cancer
William G. Kaelin
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
William Kaelin is the Sidney Farber Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Senior Physician-Scientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Among his many accolades, Dr. Kaelin received the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Society of Clinical Investigation, and the American College of Physicians. Dr. Kaelin’s research seeks to understand how, mechanistically, mutations affecting tumor-suppressor genes cause cancer. His long-term goal is to lay the foundation for new anticancer therapies based on the biochemical functions of such proteins.
Matt Boudreau
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Matt completed his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under the direction of Prof. Paul Hergenrother, where he worked on a variety of new anticancer approaches. He is currently an NCI K00 postdoctoral fellow in Prof. William G. Kaelin, Jr.’s laboratory. His current work utilizes positive selection screening to find novel natural products that degrade crucial transcription factors found in cancer.
January 25th, 2024
Host: Breanna Zerfas
Ingo Hartung
Merck Healthcare KGaA
Quality criteria for degraders – Probing biology with a novel modality
Ingo Hartung is a synthetic organic chemist by training (PhD University of Hannover/Germany, Postdoc Stanford University/US) with close to 20 years of Pharma industry experience (Schering AG, Bayer AG, Merck KGaA). He has been project leader in oncology and cardiology NCE drug discovery and has had portfolio responsibility for preclinical research in the areas of epigenetics, tumor metabolism and immuno-oncology. He is current the global head of Merck’s Medicinal Chemistry & Drug Design department. In addition to this role, Ingo is leading Merck’s global cross-functional targeted protein degradation platform. His research interests comprise all aspects of innovation in small molecule drug discovery with a special focus on new synthetic modalities like protein degraders. Ingo Hartung is a member of the Steering Committee of the Chemistry in Cancer Research Working Group of the AACR and on the Advisory Board of the President of the European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry.
February 8th, 2024
Host: Zuzanna Kozicka & Mikolaj Slabicki
Amanda Ng
CeMM
Isogenic CPA: A morphological profiling approach for discovering molecular glues
There is a saying that “A picture is worth a thousand words”. Turns out, you can get a lot of information from pictures of cells as well using morphological profiling. Amanda Ng is a PhD student in the laboratory of Georg Winter at the Center for Molecular Medicine in Vienna, Austria. Her work focuses on adapting a morphological profiling approach called the Cell Painting assay for the discovery of molecular glues. Prior to joining the Winter lab, she pursued her BSc. (Hons) studies majoring in Life Sciences at the National University of Singapore.
William A. Donald
University of South Wales
Oligomeric Remodeling by Molecular Glues Revealed Using Native Mass Spectrometry and Mass Photometry
William A. Donald is a Professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of Chemistry at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of California Berkeley in 2010. After a research fellowship at the University of Melbourne in the Bio21 Institute, he joined the School of Chemistry at the University of New South Wales in 2013. He is currently an associate editor of the Journal of Enzyme Inhibition and Medicinal Chemistry. His research interests include developing mass spectrometry-based methods to investigate protein interactions and post-translational modifications.
February 22nd, 2024
Host: Zuzanna Kozicka
Susan Shao
Harvard Medical School
Mechanism of a small molecule translation inhibitor
Sichen (Susan) Shao, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School. The Shao lab studies protein biosynthesis and quality control mechanisms using approaches integrating biochemistry, cell biology, and structural biology. The molecular insights into ribosome-associated quality control and membrane protein sorting elucidated by her lab advance our understanding of the emergence and treatments of genetic and neurodegenerative disorders. Her discoveries have been recognized by the NIH New Innovator Award, a Vallee Scholar Award, a Packard Fellowship, and the ASCB Günter Blobel Early Career Award.
Dr. Shao earned her BSE degree in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University and a PhD in Biology from the graduate partnership program between Johns Hopkins University and the National Institutes of Health. She conducted postdoctoral research with Dr. Manu Hegde at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in the United Kingdom before starting her lab.
March 7th, 2024
Host: Hojong Yoon
Ryan Potts
Amgen
Any target, every time: how proximity-based therapeutics has redefined druggablility
Ryan Potts obtained his Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology from UT Southwestern in 2007. In 2008 he was awarded the Sara and Frank McKnight junior faculty position at UT Southwestern Medical Center and appointed as Assistant Professor in the Departments of Physiology, Pharmacology, and Biochemistry in 2011. In 2016 his lab moved to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital where he was an Associate Member in the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology. In 2020, he moved to Amgen as Executive Director of Research and Head of the Induced Proximity Platform that is focused on empowering multi-specific, induced proximity therapeutic modalities through bold, creative science to expand the druggable genome and reimaging the future of drug discovery. In 2021, he took over leadership of Amgen’s Postdoctoral Fellows Program aimed at training the next generation of industry scientists. In recognition to his important contributions at Amgen, he was promoted to Scientific Vice President in 2023.
March 21st, 2024
Host: Katherine Donovan & Mikolaj Slabicki
Continuous evolution of compact protein degradation tags regulated by selective cereblon molecular glues
Stephan DeCarlo
Broad Institute
Stephan DeCarlo is a graduate student in Prof. David R. Liu’s lab at the Broad Institute. Stephan received his bachelor’s degree from Bowdoin College and worked on antibody discovery and strain engineering at Adimab prior to attending Harvard. Stephan’s research interests include using phage-assisted continuous evolution (PACE) to engineer proteins with novel functionalities.
Shourya S. Roy Burman
DFCI
Shourya S. Roy Burman is a Research Fellow in Prof. Eric Fischer’s group at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. He works on developing new chemically inducible degradation tags using computational methods and characterizing them using structural and biophysical techniques. He received the Cancer Research Institute Irving Postdoctoral Fellowship for exploring the regulation of engineered cell therapies with degron tags. Previously, he completed his Ph.D. at the Johns Hopkins University in Dr. Jeffrey Gray’s group where he developed protein docking programs for the Rosetta Macromolecular Modeling Suite.
Georg Petzold
Monte Rosa Therapeutics
Teaching CRBN new tricks
Georg Petzold received his PhD in 2012 studying E3 ligase biology and cell cycle regulation under the supervision of Jan-Michael Peters at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, Austria. In 2014, he joined the lab of Nicolas H. Thomä at the FMI in Basel to elucidate the mode of action of thalidomide analogs, clinical compounds that redirect the CRL4-CRBN E3 ligase to induce target protein degradation in the treatment of multiple myeloma and myelodysplastic syndrome. In 2021, Georg joined the team at Monte Rosa Therapeutics to unleash the full potential of this novel modality, and to develop innovative new medicines that overcome limitations of conventional approaches.
April 4th, 2024
Host: Hojong Yoon
Brian Liau
Harvard University
Chemical Facsimile of E3 Cancer Mutations Promotes Corepressor Degradation
Brian Liau is an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in Chemistry and Physics from Harvard College, before receiving a PhD in Chemistry under the guidance of Dr. Matthew Shair. During his PhD studies, Brian completed the chemical synthesis of complex bioactive natural products and investigated their biological mechanism of action. As a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Bradley Bernstein, he studied epigenetic mechanisms of adaptation and drug resistance in brain cancer. In 2016, Brian started his independent research group, which integrates chemical biology with genomics to unravel chromatin complexes and gene regulation. The Liau lab has pioneered chemical genomic approaches to systematically identify drug resistance-conferring mutations for protein drug targets, which they leverage in mechanistic studies to interrogate small molecule mechanism of action and target biology.
April 18th, 2024
Host: Mikolaj Slabicki / Breanna Zerfas
Jonathan Ostrem
UCSF
Serendipitous discovery of direct small molecule ubiquitination
Jonathan Ostrem is an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at UCSF and a thoracic oncologist at that Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. He obtained his MD and PhD from UCSF working with Dr. Kevan Shokat. After clinical training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, he completed a postdoctoral work with Dr. Stuart Schreiber at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. As a graduate student, Jonathan developed the first inhibitors of KRAS G12C paving the way for two FDA-approved targeted therapies for KRAS-mutant cancers and more than 10 now in clinical trials worldwide. Jonathan began his independent research group at UCSF in 2022. The Ostrem lab uses chemical biology approaches to take on challenging cancer targets including transcription factors and components of the ubiquitin-proteasome system.
Darci Trader
University of California, Irvine
ByeTAC: Bypassing an E3 Ligase for Targeted Protein Degradation
Dr. Trader received her PhD from Indiana University in 2013 and then went on to postdoc at The Scripps Research Institute. She began her independent career at Purdue University in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology in 2016. After being promoted with tenure, her lab moved to the University of California- Irvine in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences in 2023. Her lab is focused on developing new technology for targeted protein degradation utilizing different isoforms of the proteasome.