Bi-weekly: Thursdays, 11 am EDT/EST, 8 am PT/PST, 4 pm BST/BDT, 5 pm CEST/CET
https://dfci.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_m7JJaw52T8yZYt8-ykL6UQ
Some seminars were recorded and accessible for a limited time on our youtube channel.
Upcoming Speakers
May 2nd, 2024
Host: Mikolaj Slabicki
Stuart J. Conway and Patrick Brennan
University of California
Bringing Bump-and-Hole to Molecular Glues: The Development of Orthogonal IMiD-Degron Pairs
Stuart Conway is a Professor of Medicinal Chemistry and the inaugural holder of the Michael and Alice Jung Endowed Chair in Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Discovery at the University of California, Los Angeles. He studied Chemistry with Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Warwick (1994-1997) before undertaking PhD research at the University of Bristol (1997-2001) with Profs. Jeff Watkins FRS and David Jane. Stuart completed post-doctoral studies with Professor Andrew Holmes FRS at the University of Cambridge (2001-2003) and in 2003, he was appointed as a Lecturer in Bioorganic Chemistry at the University of St Andrews. In 2008 was appointed as an Associate Professor at Oxford, and between October 2014 and June 2023 he was a Full Professor at Oxford. He was concurrently the E. P. Abraham Cephalosporin Fellow in Organic Chemistry at St Hugh's College, Oxford.
Dr Patrick Brennan is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles. Patrick received his MSci in Biology and Chemistry from Durham University in 2016, followed by an MA in music performance from the University of Salford in 2017. Between 2018 and 2023, Patrick completed his doctoral studies at the University of Oxford, studying under Professor Stuart Conway and Professor Charlotte Deane, alongside industrial collaborators Dr Lewis Brayshaw and Dr Mike Hann at GSK. Patrick’s PhD project explored the use of ‘bump-and-hole’ methodology for the design of orthogonal immunomodulatory imide drugs (IMiDs) and complementary zinc finger (ZF) degron motifs for use in target validation and beyond. Patrick is continuing to work in the field of targeted protein degradation at UCLA, and is also broadly interested in protein engineering and de novo design, medicinal chemistry, and their applications in chemical and synthetic biology.
Diane Haakonsen
UC Berkeley
Stress response silencing in neurodegenerative disease
Diane Haakonsen received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from EPFL, Switzerland. Diane then did her graduate work at MIT in the lab of Dr. Michael Laub where she studied the regulation of gene expression and chromosome structure during the bacterial cell cycle. As a Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Michael Rapé at UC Berkeley, Diane studied the regulation of proteome homeostasis in human cells and its important role in disease. There, she combined synthetic lethal CRISPR-Cas9 screening and biochemistry to identify and characterize the mechanism to silence the cellular response to mitochondrial protein import stress. Her future research on the mechanism and function of stress response silencing aims to advance our understanding of stress response regulation which will provide novel therapeutic avenues for diseases such as neurodegeneration and cancer.
May 16th, 2024
Host: Katherine Donovan / Mikolaj Slabicki
Sandi Radko-Juettner and Hong Yue
St. Jude / DFCI
Targeting DCAF5 suppresses SMARCB1-mutant cancer by stabilizing SWI/SNF
Dr. Sandi Radko-Juettner is currently the Research Program Manager for the Hematological Malignancies Program at St. Jude Children’s Research, where she extensively collaborates on projects aimed at improving cure rates for childhood leukemias and lymphomas while minimizing treatment-related adverse effects. The research efforts she manages focus on preclinical studies validating oncogenic drivers and testing new therapies in engineered mouse models and patient-derived xenografts, as well as novel discoveries in pharmacogenetics for both clinically problematic hematological malignancies and less well-characterized malignancies. Dr. Radko-Juettner graduated in 2023 with her PhD from the St. Jude Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, completing her thesis work in the lab of Dr. Charlie Roberts. Her work in the lab focused on mechanistic studies of novel vulnerabilities in pediatric rhabdoid tumors as well as resistance mechanisms to epigenetic drugs. During her time in the Roberts lab, she was awarded with the St. Jude Doctoral Research Achievement Award as well as an NIH NCI F31 award. Her research contributions have led to co-authored papers in several prestigious journals including Nature, Molecular Cell, and Cell Reports.
Hong Yue is a Staff Scientist in the Fischer lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and Harvard Medical School. During her Ph.D. studies in Peking University, she focused on designing selective modulators of GSK3-beta and the Wnt signaling pathway. She then joined the Vidal lab to develop high-throughput screening platforms for identification of protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks. In her current role in the Fischer lab, her work has focused on assay development of novel COVID-19 antibody serological tests and biochemical and structural elucidation of E3 ligase-substrate relationships. Her work has been published in journals such as Cancer Cell and Nature as a co-first author, and she continues to pioneer high throughput systems to study targeted protein degradation through development of biochemical and cellular assays.
Francis Barany
Weill Cornell
CURE-PROs – Reversible, Self-Assembling Drugs for Targeted Protein Degradation.
Francis Barany, Ph.D. is Professor of Microbiology at Weill Cornell Medicine. Barany is best known for inventing the ligase chain reaction (LCR), ligase detection reaction (LDR), and Universal DNA arrays, which are the foundation of commercial tests to diagnose genetic diseases, detect infectious pathogens, and profile cancers using DNA microarrays and targeted next-generation sequencing (NGS). He received a Helen Hay Whitney Fellow (1982-1985), Hirschl/Monique Weill-Caulier Career Scientist Award (1992-1997), Mayent/Rothschild Visiting Professor, Institut Curie (2000), Medical Diagnostics Research leader, Scientific American 50 (2004), Ezra Innovation Award, Cornell University (2011), International Federation of Clinical Chemistry Award for Significant Contributions in Molecular Diagnostics (2014), and National Academy of Inventors Fellow (2016). Barany holds 74 issued U.S. patents and over 100 international patents that are widely used by molecular diagnostic and sequencing companies. Barany founded Coferon Inc., Acuamark Diagnostics Inc., and TwiXimo Therapeutics; the later for developing a new class of protein-degradation drugs.
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May 30th, 2024
Host: Katherine Donovan / Mikolaj Slabicki
Hubert Huang
Broad Institute
Ubiquitin-specific proximity labeling to detect E3 substrate ubiquitylation.
Hubert Huang is a research scientist at the Broad Institute under the Sellers lab. He obtained a BS in Chemistry from Duke University (2012) and conducted undergraduate research in the laboratories of Professor Michael Fitzgerald and Professor Qiu Wang. Hubert obtained his PhD in Chemical Biology in 2017 from Harvard University under the guidance of Professor Nathanael Gray and Professor Jean Zhao in the development of kinase inhibitors and degraders as cancer therapeutics. In 2019, Hubert joined the laboratory of Professor William R. Sellers at the Broad Institute as a postdoctoral scholar, where he developed a ubiquitin-specific proximity labeling approach (E-STUB) to identify E3 ubiquitin ligase substrates. Hubert’s research interest focuses on elucidating the molecular mechanisms and functions of E3 ubiquitin ligases and targeting them for therapeutic uses. Website: https://sellerslab.org
Rosa Barrio and James D. Sutherland
CIC bioGUNE
BioE3 identifies specific substrates of ubiquitin E3 ligases
Rosa Barrio and James D. Sutherland are Principal Investigator/Associate PI at CIC bioGUNE in Bilbao, Spain. The lab focuses on ubiquitin-like (UbL) modifications in development and disease. Dr. Barrio received her PhD from the Autonomous University of Madrid (ES) and Dr. Sutherland from Harvard University (MA, USA), both using Drosophila to study ubiquitin and ecdysone response, respectively. After international postdoctoral stints [Barrio: IMBB-FORTH (Crete, GR), EMBL-Heidelberg (DE), and Autonomous University of Madrid (ES); Sutherland: EMBL-Heidelberg (DE), EMBL-Monterotondo (IT) and Cancer Research UK, London (UK)], they both joined CIC bioGUNE, accredited as a Severo Ochoa Center of Excellence and part of the Basque Research and Technology Alliance (https://www.brta.eus) . They study rare diseases, e.g. Townes-Brock Syndrome (a ciliopathy-like developmental disorder) and develop biotin-based proteomic tools for querying UbL pathways. Lab website: https://www.rosabarriolab.es/
Sagar Bhogaraju and Christian Behrends
EMBL / Ludwig-Maximilians-University
A ubiquitin-specific, proximity-based labeling approach for the identification of ubiquitin ligase substrates.
Sagar Bhogaraju Sagar was born in Nizamabad, India and studied biological sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He then moved to Munich, Germany to pursue his doctoral studies on eurkaryotic cilium at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry. After PhD, Sagar moved to Frankfurt to pursue postdoctoral research in the topic of ubiquitin signaling at the Goethe University, Frankfurt Germany. In 2018, he was appointed Group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Grenoble France. Sagar’s research group at EMBL focuses on various topics under the umbrella of ubiquitin signaling in disease and physiology. The research in his group is funded by Agence Nationale de Recherche (ANR), EMBL and EMBO. Bhogaraju group webpage: https://www.embl.org/groups/bhogaraju/
Christian Behrends After completing a PhD on chaperones and aggregation-prone proteins in the group of Ulrich Hartl at the Max-Planck-Institute of Biochemistry in 2007, Christian joined the Harper lab at Harvard Medical School as post-doc to work on autophagy. In 2010, Christian started his own group at the Institute of Biochemistry II (IBC2) in the Goethe University in Frankfurt where he continued to explore cellular components that regulate autophagy or that are subject to autophagosomal degradation. During this time, the ubiquitin system gained particular attention. In 2016, Christian became professor at the Medical Faculty of Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) and his group part of the Munich Cluster for Systems Neurology (SyNergy). Behrends group webpage: www.behrendslab.com