Rhamy Zeid
Rhamy Zeid leads the target biology group at C4 Therapeutics, a biotech company that is developing a new class of small molecules that direct the machinery of the ubiquitin-proteasome system to selectively degrade disease-relevant proteins for therapeutic benefit. His group uses a chemical biology approach to characterize the mechanistic and phenotypic consequences of targeted protein degraders towards clinical utility. Before joining C4 Therapeutics, Rhamy received his PhD from Harvard Medical School in the laboratory of Dr. James Bradner, where his work focused on the characterization and disruption of cis regulatory elements towards therapeutic application. Previously, Rhamy spent time in both pharmaceutical and academic environments as a drug discovery biologist focused on the development of novel therapeutics in oncology.
Raphael Franzini
Raphael Franzini received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Stanford University working in the group of Prof. Eric T. Kool. He then performed postdoctoral research in the group of Prof. Dario Neri at ETH Zürich. In 2015, he was appointed as an assistant professor in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Utah. Research interests include the development of DNA-encoded libraries and their use for identifying chemical probes for NAD+-related targets as well as bioorthogonal chemistry for applications in drug delivery.
Nir London
Dr. Nir London received his PhD from the Hebrew university in 2011. He joined the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, as an EMBO post-doc fellow starting in 2012, and joined the Weizmann Institute as a senior scientist in 2015. Dr. London's lab is focused on covalent chemical biology and drug discovery and has developed several technologies for the design of covalent inhibitors. His honors include the Chorev Award by the Israeli Chemical Society, the Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation Award, a postdoctoral award from the Program for Breakthrough Biomedical Research. Most recently he also received the Alon fellowship, an award of excellence from the Israel Cancer Association and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation - AACR Career Development Award for Translational Breast Cancer Research.
Michelle Arkin
Michelle's lab develops innovative approaches to screen for chemical tools and drug leads, using biophysical approaches like fragment-based drug discovery and biological approaches including high-content imaging with primary cells and organisms. Our goal is to demonstrate 'druggability' of new target classes and to use our compounds to discover new targets for drug discovery. Areas of interest include protein-protein interactions, allosteric and scaffolding sites in enzymes, and orphan and neglected diseases. Michelle is co-Director of the Small Molecule Discovery Center, a collaborative research facility that includes high-throughput screening and medicinal chemistry.
Matthew Disney
Mary Matyskiela
Mary Matyskiela is currently Executive Director of Molecular Sciences at a stealth-mode startup in the targeted protein degradation space. Mary received her B.S. in Chemistry from Yale University. She then went on to perform graduate work at the University of California San Francisco studying ubiquitin ligase mechanism, followed by postdoctoral studies at the University of California Berkeley on the architecture of the 26S proteasome. From there, she moved to Celgene/BMS where she spent 6 years developing targeted protein degradation technologies and expanding the horizons of molecular glue targeting through cereblon-CRL4.
Kathryn Eldridge
Kathryn Eldridge is a Partner in the Life Sciences and Chemistry group at Kilburn & Strode. She is extremely commercially focussed, and provides her clients (both start-ups and multinational companies) with a bespoke service which allows them to maximise the value of their Intellectual property. Kathryn has extensive experience managing global IP portfolios, as well as post-grant proceedings not just in Europe but in major territories such as China, Korea and Japan, allowing her to provide her clients with an effective patenting strategy to efficiently protect their commercial products.
Jennifer Cyran
Jenni obtained her BSc in Anatomical Sciences from the University of Manchester. She then joined GlaxoWellcome just prior to it becoming GlaxoSmithKline. Jenni has spent most of her career in the field of high throughput cellular assay development and joined the world of protein degradation in 2016.
Ian Churcher
Ian joined Amphista Therapeutics as Chief Scientific Officer in 2020 where he leads a portfolio of projects focused on the development of next generation approaches to targeted protein degradation. Ian was one of the pioneers of the application of targeted protein degradation to drug discovery as Head of the Protein Degradation Discovery Performance Unit at GSK from 2012 including an extensive collaboration with Prof Craig Crews (Yale). Ian built a team which demonstrated the viability of the VHL-recruiting PROTAC strategy and advanced a portfolio of projects from early proof of degradation through to clinic-enabling studies. During a career in pharma at Merck & GSK, Ian led a range of discovery projects across many therapy areas from target validation through to lead optimisation and clinical entry as well as a number of applications of novel technology to drug discovery. More recently, Ian was SVP Drug Discovery at artificial intelligence biotech BenevolentAI where his team applied novel AI methods to tackling a series of drug discovery challenges across a portfolio of target identification and chemical optimisation projects.
Ian holds an MA and D.Phil. in Chemistry from the University of Oxford where he was also Visiting Professor in the Department of Chemistry.