Chair
Prof. Gianluca SBARDELLA
UNIVERSITY OF SALERNO, Fisciano, Italy
09:00
PL02 - Ribozymes Meet RNA Modifications
Prof. Claudia HÖBARTNER
UNIVERSITY OF WÜRZBURG, Würzburg, Germany
Claudia Höbartner is professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Würzburg. Her research interests include the synthetic, biomolecular and structural chemistry of natural and artificial nucleic acids, with a focus on natural RNA modifications and in vitro selection of ribozymes and other catalytic and functional nucleic acids.
Claudia studied Chemistry in Vienna and in Zürich, and she earned a PhD degree from the Leopold-Franzens-University Innsbruck. After postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, USA), she joined the Max Planck Institute for biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen as a Max Planck research group leader. In 2014, she was appointed professor for biomolecular label chemistry at the Georg-August-University Göttingen. Since 2017 she holds the Chair of Organic Chemistry I at the Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg.
Session 4: Target Engagement and Mechanism of Action Determination
Session Chair
Dr Andrew ZHANG
ASTRAZENECA, Waltham, United States
09:45
KL04 - Mechanistic Insight in Drug Discovery: Past Tense of Future Direction?
(Virtual Lecture)
Dr Rachel GRIMLEY
CANCER RESEARCH HORIZONS (CANCER RESEARCH UK), Cambridge, United Kingdom
Rachel is Senior Vice President of Drug Discovery for Cancer Research Horizons, Cancer Research UK. Rachel has over 20 years’ experience in pre-clinical drug discovery, incorporating target identification through to drug candidate nomination, across a number of companies. She has contributed to the discovery and characterisation of numerous drug candidates, and 3 marketed medicines, across a diverse range of disease areas including oncology, neuroscience, respiratory, cardiovascular and anti-infectives.
Rachel is also an Expert-in-Residence at the University of Oxford.
Prior to joining Cancer Research Horizons in 2021, Rachel was Executive Director and Head of Mechanistic Biology & Profiling at AstraZeneca, with global responsibility for in vitro mechanism of action studies, SAR biology profiling, Wave1 DMPK and pre-clinical safety screening across the UK, US and Sweden. Previously, Rachel held roles of increasing responsibility at Pfizer in Sandwich, GlaxoSmithKline in Stevenage and Pfizer Neusentis in Cambridge.
Rachel gained her PhD in Mechanistic Enzymology from the University of Birmingham and completed post-doctoral studies at the University of Oxford.
10:30
Coffee Break, Networking & Exhibition
11:00
IL06 - Biophysical Proteomics
Dr Mikhail SAVITSKY
EUROPEAN MOLECULAR BIOLOGY LABORATORY, Heidelberg, Germany
11:25
IL07 - Proteomics Strategies for Characterizing Degraders and E3 Ligases
Dr Meha SINGH
ASTRAZENECA, Waltham, United States
Meha joined the Chemical Biology Team at AstraZeneca in August 2020 having worked with MNK-inhibitors for her postdoc at University of Basel, Switzerland. The multidisciplinary study combined in vitro pharmacology, functional genetics and Mass Spectrometry based proteomics to elucidate novel mechanism of action of MNK signaling in ribosomal control of new protein synthesis in neurons. Her Proteomics expertise comes from her work at Prof John Yates laboratory at The Scripps Research Institute, San Diego USA in 2014, where she developed novel phosphopeptide enrichment methods to map signaling changes in brains of nicotine-addicted mice. In the Chemical Biology and Proteomics Team at AstraZeneca she is using chemical and proteomics means to uncover and harness disease-relevant biology for delivering new therapeutic paradigms. Meha completed her PhD from ICGEB, India in 2010.
11:50
OC04 - Morphological Profiling of Small Molecules Using the Cell Painting Assay
Dr Slava ZIEGLER
MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE OF MOLECULAR PHYSIOLOGY, Dortmund, Germany
Slava Ziegler, born in Bulgaria, started studying Molecular Biology at the Kliment Ochridski University in Sofia, Bulgaria, and after a year she moved to Germany to study Biochemistry at the Ruhr University Bochum. She obtained her PhD in 2004 at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology (Dortmund, Germany) working on tumor genetics and Wnt signaling. She then joined the Institute of Pathology at the University of Duesseldorf to explore mechanisms of tumor invasion and metastasis. Since July 2009 she has been leading a project group in the department Chemical Biology of Prof. Dr. Herbert Waldmann at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology with focus on cell-based assays for exlporing bioactivity of small molecules and identification and validation of the targets of bioactive compounds.
12:10
Lunch, Networking & Exhibition
Session 5: Protein Conformations: Beyond the Ground State
Session Chair
Dr Wolfgang JAHNKE
NOVARTIS INSTITUTES FOR BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH, Basel, Switzerland
13:40
KL05 - Evolution of Energy Landscapes and its Exploitation for Drug and Enzyme Design
Prof. Dorothee KERN
BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY, Waltham, United States
14:25
IL08 - Structure and Dynamics at Multiple Time Scales to Understand the Oncogenic kRas Cycle
Prof. Andras PERCZEL
EÖTVÖS LORÁND UNIVERSITY, Budapest, Hungary
14:50
IL09 - NMR Provides Unique Insight into the Role of Disorder in Highly Dynamic Viral Replication Assemblies
Prof. Martin BLACKLEDGE
INSTITUT DE BIOLOGIE STRUCTURALE (IBS), Grenoble, France
15:15
OC05 - Spatiotemporally Controlled Generation of Ntps as A Versatile Tool for Single-Molecule Studies
Prof. Sebastian DEINDL
UPPSALA UNIVERSITY, Uppsala, Sweden
Born in Basel, Sebastian Deindl is a Professor of Molecular Biophysics at Uppsala University in Sweden. He received his Master of Biochemistry from the University of Tübingen in 2004 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009 under the supervision of John Kuriyan. He then worked with Xiaowei Zhuang as a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University from 2009 to 2014. Sebastian has received several awards including a recent ERC Advanced Grant and the EMBO Young Investigator Award.
15:35
Coffee Break, Networking & Exhibition
Session 6: Targeting Metabolism (ICBS Session)
Session Chair
Prof. Zaneta NIKOLOVSKA-COLESKA
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, Ann Arbor, United States
16:05
KL06 - Understanding the Role of Metabolism in Cancer
Prof. Matthew G. VANDER HEIDEN
MIT, Cambridge, United States
Matthew Vander Heiden is the Director of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and is the Lester Wolfe Professor in Molecular Biology in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also an Institute Member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, and an Instructor of Medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Vander Heiden received his MD and PhD degree from the University of Chicago. He also completed clinical training in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital / Dana-Farber Cancer Institute prior to completing a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School. His laboratory studies how metabolism is regulated to meet the needs of cells in different physiological situations with a focus on understanding the role of metabolism in cancer.
16:50
IL10 - Chemical Biology of Sterol-mediated Processes
Dr Luca LARAIA
TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF DENMARK, Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark
Luca studied chemistry at Imperial College London before obtaining a PhD in chemical biology from the University of Cambridge in 2014. He moved to the Max Planck Institute of molecular physiology as an Alexander von Humboldt post-doctoral researcher before taking up an assistant professorship at the Technical University of Denmark. As an associate professor in chemical biology, he now leads a research group focused on developing chemical tools to study sterol-mediated processes as well as new methods in natural product-inspired compound library synthesis.
17:15
OC06 - The Hidden Activator Within the Inhibitor: Regulated Tissue-Selective Inhibition and Activation of the Sugar Tolerance Transcription Factor Chrebp
Dr Maren HEIMHALT
LUDWIG MAXIMILIAN UNIVERSITÄT, Planegg-Martinsried, Germany
I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the LMU in Munich focusing on the design of artificial
proproteins. With my innovative approach, I aim to advance pharmacotherapy beyond small
molecule drugs and towards more targeted therapies tailored to specific diseased tissues.
During my PhD at McMaster University, I gained expert knowledge in enzymology. Besides
diving deep into enzyme kinetics, I received training in X-ray crystallography to structurally
characterize binding interactions of our small molecules. Inspired by the “Resolution
Revolution” in Cryo-EM, I continued my structural biology journey by joining the MRC-LMB in
Cambridge. There, I focused on the regulation of the mTORC1 complex, the major regulator of
cell growth and proliferation. The aspects of metabolism finally led me to Munich where I am
now testing my in vitro hypotheses in cellular assays as well in vivo on the model organism D.
melanogaster.
With these tools in hand, I am now thrilled to develop engineered therapeutically relevant
proproteins that can be activated by tissue- or disease-specific proteases, to explore novel
treatment options for a targeted pharmacotherapy.
17:35
Poster Session II (Even), Networking & Exhibition
19:10
20:00