January 9th, 2025
Host: Shourya Roy Burman
Dennis Hu
Drug Hunter
Industry Highlights in Targeted Protein Degradation
Dennis founded Drug Hunter to give drug discovery scientists easy access to transferable knowledge from drug discovery programs throughout the industry. Today, Drug Hunter serves thousands of scientists from hundreds of institutions around the world including most of the top biotech and pharma companies, government institutions including the NIH, and investors in therapeutics discovery companies. Prior to serving as Drug Hunter Inc.'s CEO, Dennis began his career as a medicinal chemist and project team leader at a now publicly-listed biotech startup (FLX Bio/RAPT), where he contributed to the discovery of a phase II drug candidate for cancer immunotherapy. He later joined Genentech, and has published and patented chemical matter supporting a diverse range of target classes. He earned his PhD in Chemistry from Stanford University, MPhil by Research from the University of Cambridge on a Churchill Scholarship, and a dual BA/MS from Northwestern University as a Goldwater Scholar.
.jpg)
January 23rd, 2025
Host: Mikolaj Slabicki
Itay Koren
Bar-Ilan University
Ub or Not Ub: Decoding Ubiquitin-Dependent and Independent Degradation Pathways
Itay is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Life Sciences at Bar-Ilan University. Itay obtained his PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Dept. of Molecular Genetics, where he studied autophagy under the supervision of Prof. Adi Kimchi. In 2013, he joined the lab of Steve Elledge at the Harvard Medical School, Boston, as a post-doctoral fellow. Itay established his independent lab at Bar-Ilan University in 2019, where he employs genome-wide approaches and genetic tools to explore the ubiquitin proteasome system. His research focuses on the mechanisms that regulate substrate recognition and their implications for signal transduction and protein quality control pathways.
February 6th, 2025
Host: Breanna Zerfas
Lauren Albrecht
University of California, Irvine
Methylarginine targeting chimeras for lysosomal degradation of intracellular proteins
Walid Houdry
University of Toronto
The ClpP Protease: From Basic Principles to Drug Discovery
​
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.
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 / Mikolaj Slabicki
Charlotte Crowe
University of Dundee
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.
Alessandra Salerno
University of Dundee
FerroTACs: harnessing ferrocene as a molecular hinge for the design of conformationally dynamic PROTAC linkers.
Alessandra Salerno has been a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Targeted Protein Degradation at the University of Dundee since 2023, working under the supervision of Professor Alessio Ciulli. She earned her PhD in Medicinal Chemistry from the University of Bologna (Italy) in 2022, enriching her academic background through various international research experiences. Currently funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship through UKRI, her research focuses on the development of innovative chemical modalities in the field of PROTACs and targeted protein degradation (TPD). Her recent work includes the design of novel PROTAC linkers incorporating unique chemotypes (i.e., FerroTACs) and the application of combinatorial chemistry strategies to streamline PROTAC identification. Her wider scientific interests span proximity labelling methods for probing protein-protein interactions, as well as the discovery of anti-infective agents.
May 1st, 2025
Host: Hubert Huang
Larry Hamann
Interdict Bio
Sequence-Selective Translation Inhibition as a Novel, Proximity-Based Cancer Therapeutic Modality
Larry Hamann is currently co-founder, president and CEO of Interdict Bio, pioneering small-molecule context-dependent translation inhibitors for addressing historically undruggable targets in oncology and neurodegeneration. Previously, he was Global Head of Discovery at Takeda. Prior to Takeda, he was Corporate VP and Global Head of Small Molecule Drug Discovery at Celgene, and prior to Celgene, stints at Novartis, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Ligand. In >30 years in drug discovery, his teams have advanced >22 molecules into the clinic, including ONGLYZA™, DAKLINZA™, and branaplam, as well as mezigdomide, golcadomide, and gridegalutamide - targeted protein degraders all currently in Phase III. He is co-inventor on >70 patents, co-author on >90 scientific publications, and advises many biotechs and VCs. He is a recipient of the ACS Heroes of Chemistry Award, the ACS Division of Medicinal Chemistry Award, and was inducted into the Medicinal Chemistry Hall of Fame. Larry holds a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Michigan.
Nick Till
Stanford University
Redirecting Trogocytosis for Targeted Protein Transfer
Nick Till earned a B.A. in Chemistry from Reed College where he studied bismuth catalysis in Professor Rebecca LaLonde’s lab. After internship experiences at Gilead and Genentech, Nick joined Professor David W. C. MacMillan’s lab at Princeton University where he completed his Ph.D. in Chemistry. There he developed new Ni/photoredox dual catalytic reactions and elucidated elementary mechanistic steps relevant to cross-coupling reactions that are widely employed in academic and industrial settings. He then joined Professor Carolyn Bertozzi’s lab at Stanford University where he works as an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow using chemical approaches to manipulate the cell surface through various induced proximity modalities.
May 15th, 2025
Host: Katherine Donovan
Rebecca Metivier
DFCI
Unveiling the hidden interactome of CRBN molecular glues with chemoproteomics.
Rebecca received her BS in Marine Biology from Roger Williams University and her MS in Chemical Biology from Boston College. After receiving her Masters, Rebecca worked as a Research associate in the proteomics group in the Center for Protein degradation where she focused on target identification using established methodology as well as leading the development of new workflows within the group. Rebecca joined the the TPD Proteomics Core as a Scientist in 2021 where she employs various chemoproteomics methods to study cellular responses to protein degraders and molecular glues. She also leads the development and optimization of new methods and technologies for the group.
Martin Steger
NEOsphere Biotechnologies
Integrated high-throughput proteomics platform for degrader target discovery and validation.
-
PhD in molecular cancer research from the University of Zurich (Switzerland)
-
Postdoc at the MPI of Biochemistry in Martinsried (Germany), working on Parkinson's disease and using global proteomics and phosphoproteomics to discover the first molecular marker for LRRK2 protein kinase
-
Currently industry researcher (Head of Degrader Biochemistry and Co-founder) at NEOsphere Biotechnologies, using state-of-the-art proteomics methods for screening protein degraders and validating target candidates of degraders.