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Cryo-EM in Drug Discovery Virtual Event – Hosted by Thermo Fisher Scientific

September 29, 2020 @ 8:00 am - 12:30 pm

Join us to discover recent scientific results and practical considerations.

Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has proven instrumental for offering high-resolution molecular insights with cancer, infectious diseases, and neurological diseases. Join us for this virtual event to learn how advances in cryo-EM provide structure-based insights to discovery pipeline projects. In this virtual edition of our Cryo-EM in Drug Discovery Series, experts from the pharma and biopharma industries—including AstraZeneca, GSK and more—will highlight their recent successes and practical considerations. And don’t miss our breaking news session!

9:00am

Two keynote lectures from leaders in the field of cryo-EM and electron diffraction will present latest results and how these techniques enable them to push the boundaries of their pipeline and research projects.

Presenters:

Dr. Christopher Phillips, Associate Director Structural Biology, Astra Zeneca, is a leader in pharmaceutical research with expertise in fragment-based drug discovery, structure-based drug design, target analysis, kinases, phosphodiesterases, nuclear hormone receptors, and proteases. In his current role, as Associate Director of Structural Biology at Astra Zeneca, he is leading a team of scientists supporting pipeline projects with structural insights.

In his previous role as a senior principal scientist at Pfizer for over 13 years, he developed the core capabilities in macromolecular crystallography with emphasis on the application of structural information in the drug discovery process. Chris acquired a D. Phil in macromolecular crystallography and was also a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Oxford.

Chris has been an enthusiastic contributor and strong supporter of the Cambridge Pharmaceutical Consortium. The consortium has brought together pharmaceutical companies, the University of Cambridge, the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), and Thermo Fisher Scientific. Chris believes that cryo-EM is going to be a core technique within structural biology and that it will have a huge impact on our understanding of molecular processes.

Professor Paul Midgley FRS, University of Cambridge, was educated at the University of Bristol where he was awarded a Master of Science degree and a PhD for work on electron microscopy of high-temperature superconductors.

Professor Midgley is Professor of Materials Science in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy in the University of Cambridge. He is distinguished for many innovations and impressive applications of transmission microscopy, diffraction and spectroscopy. In recent years has focused on the development of electron tomography, electron crystallography, precession electron diffraction, and energy loss spectroscopy and their application to nanoscale organic and inorganic materials. He sits on the Editorial Boards of a number of journals and was for many years Editor-in-Chief of the journal Ultramicroscopy.

10:15am

Learn more on our recently launched iSPA Workflow solution, specifically designed to accelerate the structure-based drug discovery process. We will share some exciting results from the Thermo Scientific Krios Rx Cryo-Transmission Electron Microscope (Cryo-TEM)—the flagship of the iSPA Workflow—and how this high-end cryo-EM solution can speed up your hit and lead optimization steps.

Presenter:

Professor Patrick Sexton and his team at the Monash University Institute of Pharmaceutical Science are luminaries in GPCR research, particularly cryo-EM of GPCRs, including production of novel highly challenging GPCR complexes. Based on the advances uncovered by his laboratory’s research, Prof. Sexton has established collaborations with several pharmaceutical companies. Now, he has entered into a collaboration with Thermo Fisher Scientific to progress GPCR Cryo-EM and Drug Design. This collaboration is a joint effort dedicated to bringing cryo-EM of GPCRs closer to industry scientists.

10:45am

Experts in the field will elaborate about their experiences with getting cryo-EM technology in-house and offer practical consideration for how to setup a successfully running cryo-EM workflow.

Presenter:

Dr. Rebecca Ebenhoch is a Research scientist at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma GmbH & Co. KG in Biberach. Having previously done a post-doc at SGC in Oxford, her research interest lies on structure guided drug design using X-ray crystallography and Cryo-EM as well as on biophysical protein characterization.

Dr. Alexey Rak has a M.sc in Biology Genetics, and in Biochemistry. He then competed PhDs in Biochemistry and Biophysics working on protein biosynthesis machinery characterization. He did his Post-doc and then held a Group Leader Position at Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology in Germany working in the field of vesicular membrane trafficking. For his work he was awarded several honours including European Young Investigator Award in 2004. Since 2007 Alexey joined Sanofi in Paris where he has developed new methods to characterize biophysical properties of proteins including biologics and enabling the lead discovery of challenging protein targets. Since 2014 he is heading Bio Structure and Biophysics Department at integrated Drug Discovery in Sanofi.

Dr. Denis Zeyer is CEO of NovAliX a client-centric organization providing expert driven innovative outsourcing and insourcing research services for drug discovery. Core expertize includes synthetic organic chemistry expertise, FBDD and SBDD. The comprehensive portfolio of biophysical and analytical technologies include: chemical microarray SPR, native MS, NMR, Biacore, ITC as well as strong structural biology expertise based on x-ray crystallography and electron microscopy.

Dr. Jeremy Rees, Strategic Account Manager, Thermo Fisher Scientific, received his PhD in electron microscopy of parasites from the University of East Anglia. He went on to work for Sanofi where he setup and ran the international center for Electron Microscopy. Since 1996 he has worked for what is now Thermo Fisher in various roles from application science to sales and marketing. He is currently Strategic Account Manager enabling the adoption of Cryo-EM at pharma companies throughout Europe.

Dr. Chun-wa Chung, Structural and Biophysical Science Group, GSK, 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.

Dr. Jason van Rooyen, Cryo-Electron, Microscopy Industrial Liaison, eBIC, is a microscopist by training, with almost two decades of EM experience, Jason studied Structural Biology at the University of Cape Town where he went on to study macromolecular crystallography for his Doctorate. Followed by post-doctoral studies at EMBL in Grenoble, his research interests have always focused on the interplay of these techniques for understanding challenging life-processes in human diseases.

More recently, he was pulled back to the now more capable field of cryo-EM by the promise of “actionable-insights” from near-atomic resolution structures. In support of this revolution he has spent several years in EM-focused scientific computing, deploying automated acquisition systems and HPC processing pipelines.

Currently, as the scientific lead of Diamond’s industry-dedicated “tube-to-structure” platform, eBIC for Industry, he is helping pharma and bio-tech companies apply next-generation EM in their challenging research problems.

Details

Date:
September 29, 2020
Time:
8:00 am - 12:30 pm
Website:
https://bit.ly/3kz7kAc