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
February 6th, 2025
Host: Breanna Zerfas
Lauren Albrecht
University of California, Irvine
Walid Houdry
University of Toronto
The ClpP Protease: From Basic Principles to Drug Discovery
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Dr. Walid A. Houry is Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Department of Chemistry at the University of Toronto. Dr. Houry obtained his PhD from Cornell University and then did his postdoctoral training at the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York City and at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biochemistry in Munich, Germany. He is interested in the general area of cellular stress responses and the role of molecular chaperones and proteases in these responses. His group is also interested in the development of novel anticancers, antibiotics, and antivirals by identifying compounds that target these chaperones and proteases and result in the dysregulation of protein homeostasis in the cell. He has been recognized with several national and international awards. He is currently serving as the President of the Canadian Society for Molecular Biosciences.
Dr. Albrecht is an assistant professor at the University of California Irvine. Her focuses on understanding new principles of lysosomal biology in health and for the development of proximity-based tools. Dr. Albrecht earned her PhD from Northwestern studying genetic skin and heart disease and completed her postdoc at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, UCLA. In the Fall of 2021, Dr. Albrecht started her independent research lab at UCI. Her work has been supported by an NIGMS MIRA, the American Heart Association, the A.P. Giannini Foundation, Ono Pharmaceutical, and the Cystinosis Research Foundation. In her latest work, Dr. Albrecht leverages a novel lysosomal degron to develop an innovative proximity-based modality – MrTAC – featured on the Cover of Nature Chemical Biology in December 2024.
February 20th, 2025
Host: Hojong Yoon
Yuh Min Chook
UT Southwestern
Drug-induced CRL5ASB8-mediated degradation of XPO1 occur via an allosteric mechanism
Yuh Min Chook is a Professor of Pharmacology and Biophysics, the Alfred and Mabel Gilman Chair in Molecular Pharmacology and the Eugene McDermott Scholar in Biomedical Research at UT Southwestern. Her lab studies nuclear-cytoplasmic transport by the importin/exportin nuclear transport receptors, with emphasis on cargo recognition and inhibition.
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.