Phil Chamberlain

Nan Ji

Nan Ji, Ph.D., is Executive Director and Head of Chemistry at Kymera Therapeutics. Nan has more than 10 years of drug discovery experience. Before Kymera, he spent 2 years at Mitobridge (now part of Astellas), where he was responsible for its NAD+-boosting portfolio with multiple approaches to modulate mitochondrial functions. Prior to that, Nan spent 7+ years at Novartis, where he contributed to and delivered multiple clinical and preclinical development candidates. Nan obtained his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry with Prof. Andy Myers and conducted his postdoc with Prof. Eric Jacobsen at Harvard University.

Seth Margolis

Dr. Margolis received his Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry at the University of Rochester (Rochester, NY).  In 1999, he joined graduate school at Duke University Medical Center (Durham, North Carolina) in the department of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology.  There, Dr. Margolis completed a doctoral thesis with Dr. Sally Kornbluth focusing on molecular mechanisms of DNA-responsive cell cycle checkpoints using the frog Xenopus egg extract system.  Following completion of a Ph.D., in 2006 Dr. Margolis joined the laboratory of Dr. Michael Greenberg in the department of Neurobiology at Harvard University (Boston, Massachusetts).  During a postdoctoral tenure with the guidance and support of Dr. Greenberg, Dr. Margolis focused his efforts on the molecular pathways that regulate excitatory synapse formation and investigating their relevance to the pathophysiology of the cognitive disorder Angelman Syndrome.  In September 2011, Dr. Margolis joined the Department of Biological Chemistry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as an Assistant Professor. The vast majority of Dr. Margolis work is centered on understanding how molecular mechanisms that restrict synapses during development are reactivated in neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disease. To this end, Dr. Margolis and his group use genetically engineered mouse models of disease and a multidisciplinary approach that combines aspect of molecular biology, biochemistry and in vivo synapse imaging in order to develop hypothesis about the underlying cause of synapse degeneration and cognitive decline.  They then use genetic rescue or stereotactic approaches to target distinct pathways followed by a wide range of behavioral tasks to assay cognitive function and tests their hypotheses.  More recently, Dr. Margolis has developed a new direction focused on cellular protein homeostasis mechanisms related to protein degradation and their impact on changes in the function and physiology of the nervous system. Using a wide range of classic biochemical purification approaches, Dr. Margolis and his team have identified novel proteasome mediated pathways in the nervous system and are just beginning to understand their relevance to health and disease.

Manfred Koegl

Manfred Koegl is a director in Oncology Research in Vienna, working on the discovery and implementation of new therapeutic concepts in cancer. Presently, his team focuses on targeted protein degradation in cancer cell signaling.

Before 2010, he worked at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, Germany. He has worked at several small biotech companies in Heidelberg, including Phenex Pharmaceuticals. Manfred Koegl studied biology in Vienna and received his PhD in cell biology in 1994 at the EMBL, Heidelberg.

James Hunt

James Hunt is an Associate Director in the Discovery Biology department of Discovery Sciences, which is part of the AstraZeneca IMED Biotech Unit.  James leads the Affinity Reagents team, who have global responsibility for delivering antibodies and other affinity reagents for use as research tools to AstraZeneca’s Innovative Medicines and Early Development drug discovery programmes.

Adam Gilbert

Adam joined Pfizer in February 2010 as an Associate Research Fellow and a lab head in charge of the Experimental Design Chemistry (EDC) – a group that focused on key portfolio projects with challenging medicinal chemistry design issues including covalent inhibitors, allosteric GPCR modulators, and chemoproteomics. EDC helped drive candidate molecule discovery for Rare Diseases, Neuroscience, and Immunology programs highlighted by PF-06651600 (ritlecitinib), a covalent JAK3/Tec inhibitor, that has recently been submitted as an NDA for Alopecia areata.  Adam is currently an Executive Director in charge of Pfizer’s Design and Synthesis Sciences (DSS) Group.  DSS is a platform medchem group located in Pfizer’s Discovery Sciences Department in Groton, CT which helps drive key Pfizer initiatives such as protein degradation, DNA-encoded library chemistry, and selection analysis, covalent inhibitor design, vaccine protein design, small molecule purification, and small molecule NMR.

Eric Fischer

Daniel Nomura

Dan Nomura is a professor in the Departments of Chemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology, and Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UCSF. He is also the director of the Novartis-Berkeley Center for Proteomics and Chemistry Technologies. Dr. Nomura is also an editor for Cell Chemical Biology and Current Protocols in Chemical Biology. He earned his B.A. in Molecular and Cell Biology and Ph.D. in Molecular Toxicology with Professor John Casida at UC Berkeley and was a postdoctoral fellow at The Scripps Research Institute in chemical physiology with Professor Ben Cravatt before returning to UC Berkeley as a faculty member in 2011. Among his honors are selection as a Searle Scholar, American Cancer Society Research Scholar Award, the Department of Defense Breakthroughs Award, and the Mark Foundation for Cancer Research INSPIRE award. Research in the Nomura Research Group is focused on reimagining druggability using chemoproteomic platforms to discover new disease therapies. 

Anne Bertolotti

Anne obtained her Ph.D. from Strasbourg University (France), and did a post doc at The Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, NYU, New York. She has been a group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology since 2006. She was an INSERM Investigator from 2000 to 2006, was elected an EMBO Young Investigator in 2005, was awarded an ERC consolidator grant in 2013, became and EMBO member in 2013 and won the Hooke Medal in 2014. In 2017, she became a Fellow of the National Academy of Medical Sciences in the UK and was awarded a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award.  In 2018, she won the GlaxoSmithKline Award from the Biochemical Society.

Anne has made seminal contributions to our current understanding of protein quality control mechanisms in cells, which represent the cellular defence systems against potentially harmful proteins. She was one of the pioneer in the discovery of mammalian unfolded protein response and more recently discovered the pathways by which cells maintain proteasome homeostasis.

She has also identified mechanisms underlying the deposition of misfolded proteins in neurodegenerative diseases and contributed to a dogmatic shift in this field with the discovery that mutant SOD1 aggregates propagate indefinitely just like prions.

With the knowledge acquired on protein quality control systems, Anne identified strategies to boost their function and is currently exploiting them for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. One of the strategy consists in selective inhibition of a phosphatase, an important advance because phosphatases were thought to be undruggable.

Craig Crews

Dr. Crews is the Lewis Cullman Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and holds joint appointments in the departments of Chemistry and Pharmacology at Yale University.  He graduated from the U. Virginia with a B.A. in Chemistry and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in Biochemistry. Dr. Crews has a foothold in both the academic and biotech arenas; on the faculty at Yale since 1995, his laboratory pioneered the use of small molecules to control intracellular protein levels. In 2003, he co-founded Proteolix, whose proteasome inhibitor, Kyprolis™ received FDA approval for the treatment of multiple myeloma.  Since Proteolix’s purchase by Onyx Pharmaceuticals in 2009, Dr. Crews has focused on a new ‘induced protein degradation’ drug development technology, PROTACs, which served as the founding IP for his latest New Haven-based biotech venture, Arvinas, Inc.  From 2008 to 2018, Dr. Crews served an Editor of Cell Chemical Biology and he currently serves on several editorial boards.  In addition, he has received numerous awards and honors, including the CURE Entrepreneur of the Year Award (2013), Ehrlich Award for Medicinal Chemistry (2014), Yale Cancer Center Translational Research Prize (2015), a NIH R35 Outstanding Investigator Award (2015), the AACR Award for Outstanding Achievement in Chemistry in Cancer Research (2017), the  Khorana Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry( 2018), the  Pierre Fabre Award for Therapeutic Innovation (2018), the Pharmacia-ASPET Award for Experimental Therapeutics (2019) and was named an American Cancer Society Professor in 2018.