Targeting protein degradation 3 – from discovery to the clinic

Alice Harnden is a medicinal chemist at the Institute of Cancer Research, London. She works on projects within the team of Professor Swen Hoelder seeking to discover new cancer treatments. She gain her undergraduate degree at Oxford University and completed her PhD at Durham University in 2019.

Andrew Leach

Andrew Leach is Head of Chemical Biology and Head of Industry Partnerships at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). At the EBI he is responsible for a number of widely-used resources including ChEMBL, SureChEMBL, UniChem and ChEBI. His group is also involved in various international collaborations and consortia including Illuminating the Druggable Genome, Open Targets and EUbOPEN. His industry team works with the many commercial organisations and companies that make extensive use of the EBI's resources. He joined the EBI from GlaxoSmithKline, where over more than 20 years he was involved in the development and application of new platform capabilities for drug discovery in areas including computational chemistry and cheminformatics, fragment-based drug discovery, cardiovascular safety, proteomics and biological mass spectrometry. He also contributed to therapeutic projects and led GSK’s early Discovery portfolios against protease, ion channel and epigenetic targets.

James Hodgkinson is a lecturer in Organic Chemistry and Chemical Biology at the Leicester Institute of Structural and Chemical Biology (LISCB) and School of Chemistry, University of Leicester. James completed his undergraduate degree in Chemistry at Queens University Belfast with a year in industry at GlaxoSmithKline and went on to complete his doctoral studies under the joint supervision of Professor David Spring (Department of Chemistry) and Dr Martin Welch (Department of Biochemistry), University of Cambridge. After a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge James was appointed to Lecturer at the University of Leicester in 2016. His current research interests are in the design and synthesis of heterobifunctional molecules to modulate Class-I Histone Deacetylase (HDAC) enzymes implicated in haematological cancers and other diseases, as well as chemical probes to aid structural studies of the protein-protein interactions within Class-I HDAC corepressor complexes.

Oskar leads our efforts in medicinal chemistry at Celeris Therapeutics. He works closely with our technology group to develop computation methods for the design of proximity-inducing compounds (PIC™) and validates PICs ex silico. Oskar holds a DPhil in organic chemistry from the University of Oxford, UK. Under the supervision of Prof. Donohoe, he worked on the total synthesis of marine furanocembranoidal natural products. At Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel, Switzerland, he worked in the department of small molecule process development. At the Ferrier Research Institute in Wellington, New Zealand, Oskar designed and synthesized enzyme inhibitors as a visiting researcher.