17th EFMC Short Course on Medicinal Chemistry

Chun-wa currently leads the UK structural and biophysical science group at GSK’s major European research site in Stevenage. This group supports crystallography, electron microscopy, structural mass spectrometry and biophysical studies from HTS hit triage and mode-of-action analysis to fragment screening across a wide range of therapeutic areas and drug modalities (e.g. small molecule, biopharmaceuticals, CGT). She joined GSK after a degree in Natural Sciences (Chemistry) and PhD in NMR method development both at the University of Cambridge. Since then she has led and supported many project teams with a wide repertoire of structural and biophysical techniques. As well as leading the introduction of new technologies into GSK, such as medium throughput surface plasmon resonance for hit triage, Rapidfire MS for compound screening and most recently, HDX-MS and EM for molecular binding and mechanistic elucidation.

Alessio Ciulli holds the Personal Chair of Chemical and Structural Biology at the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee. His laboratory focuses on developing small molecules inducing protein degradation and targeting protein-protein interactions (PPIs). His group’s significant discoveries jump-started the PROTAC field and led to significant commercial impact across academia and biopharma worldwide. He is the scientific founder of Amphista therapeutics, a company that develops new protein degradation platforms. Alessio graduated in Chemistry from his hometown Florence, Italy (2002) and obtained a PhD in Chemical Biology from Cambridge, UK (2006). Following post-doctoral research at Cambridge, and a brief visit at Yale University, he returned to Cambridge in 2009 to start his independent career. In 2013 Alessio moved his laboratory to Dundee and was promoted to Full Professor in 2016. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and recipient of several prestigious awards.

Danette L. Daniels, Ph.D. is a Vice President of the Protein Degrader Platform at Foghorn Therapeutics developing therapeutic degraders in the areas of epigenetics and oncology. She was an early leader in the field of targeted protein degradation, pioneering approaches to monitor cellular kinetics of degradation, understand mechanism of action, and most recently, co-developing a new PROTAC modality. She received her PhD in Biophysics at Yale University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford School of Medicine studying the Wnt signaling pathway.

Ingo Hartung is a synthetic organic chemist by training (PhD University of Hannover/Germany, Postdoc Stanford University/US) with more than 15 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 and immuno-oncology. In addition to his current role as head of Merck’s MedChem group in Germany, Ingo is leading Merck’s global cross-functional TPD platform. His research interests comprise all aspects of innovation in medicinal chemistry with a special focus on new synthetic modalities like protein degraders.

Andrea is one of the founding scientists of Amphista Therapeutics and he is now Director of Exploratory Chemistry. Prior to Amphista Andrea was Senior Research Associate at the University of Dundee, in the group of Prof. Alessio Ciulli, working on the development of small molecules inducing protein degradation. Andrea has a MSci in organic chemistry (University of Milan, Italy) and a PhD in medical imaging from the University of Aberdeen. He is a co-author on over 30 papers and patents.