Bi-weekly: Thursdays, 12 pm EDT/EST, 9 am PT/PST, 5 pm BST/BDT, 6 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
September 24th, 2026
Host: Hubert
DCAF11-dependent molecular glue degrader activated by glutathionylation
Hojong Yoon
University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
Hojong Yoon is an assistant professor in the Department of Experimental Therapeutics at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and an assistant member of the James P. Allison Institute.
He received his PhD in Chemical Biology from Harvard University, where he trained under Dr. Eric Fischer and Dr. Nathanael Gray. As a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Benjamin Ebert at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute, he developed approaches to systematically identify molecular glues and uncovered new mechanisms of their mode of action.
In 2025, Hojong started his independent research group at MD Anderson, and his laboratory leverages chemical biology and proximity pharmacology to discover small molecules that induce novel protein-protein interactions, expanding the scope of therapeutic intervention and redefining druggability.
Franziska Wachter
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Franziska Wachter is a pediatric oncologist and physician–scientist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on the molecular mechanisms that govern transcriptional control in normal development and cancer, with particular emphasis on how protein complexes and chromatin regulators establish and maintain aberrant cell states. She integrates structural biology, chemical biology, and functional genomics to identify mechanisms of transcriptional dysregulation and uncover new therapeutic opportunities. Supported by an NIGMS K99/R00 award, she is currently transitioning to independence and establishing a research program centered on the molecular mechanisms of transcriptional regulation in cancer.
Michelle Estrada
Abbvie
Decoding E3 Ligase Ligand Discovery: Challenges, Insights, and Lessons Learned
Michelle earned her Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from Colorado State University under the mentorship of Prof. Robert M. Williams, where her research focused on the synthesis of complex natural products. During graduate school, she was awarded both the NSF Bridge to the Doctorate Fellowship and the Bristol-Myers Squibb Minority Chemist Program Graduate Fellowship. In 2014, she joined the University of Pennsylvania as the Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow for Academic Diversity in Prof. Jeffrey D. Winkler’s laboratory, where she continued developing biologically active natural products and analogs.
Michelle transitioned to industry as a Scientist in Medicinal Chemistry at Peloton Therapeutics, contributing to small-molecule oncology drug discovery programs. In 2019, she joined AbbVie as a Senior Scientist on the Protein Degradation Platform Team, where she leveraged fragment-based drug discovery, DNA-encoded library (DEL) screening, high-throughput screening, and structure-based drug design to identify and advance novel chemical matter. In 2024, she served as member on the ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters Early Career Board. Michelle is currently part of AbbVie’s Global Medicinal Chemistry team.
Throughout her career, Michelle has applied her expertise in synthetic organic chemistry to address complex challenges across emerging therapeutic modalities and drug discovery platforms. Outside of work, she enjoys fishing for king salmon and trout on Lake Michigan.
October 8th, 2026
Host: John / Hubert
Gerald Crabtree
Stanford University
Rewiring Cancer Drivers to Activate Programmed Cell Death Using Chemically Induced Proximity
Jerry Crabtree grew up in rural West Virginia, studied chemistry and math and then went to Temple medical school. Shortly after graduation he went back to his first love, which was research. His early work helped define the signaling and transcriptional pathways by which the T cell antigen receptor communicates with the nucleus to activate the immune response genes. With Stuart Schreiber he developed chemical inducers of proximity to explore the roles of proximity in biology and as a tool to understand biologic processes such as signal transduction, epigenetics and protein degradation. In 2021 he came up with the idea that one could use chemically induced proximity to rewire cancer drivers to activate programmed cell death, which will be the primary topic of his seminar.
October 22nd, 2026
Host: Mikolaj
A Cell-based Positive Selection Assay for the Target-Centric Identification of Molecular Glue Degraders
Michele Pagano
NYU
Michele Pagano, MD, serves as Chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology and is the May Ellen and Gerald Jay Ritter Professor of Oncology at the New York University School of Medicine. Since 2008, he has also been an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Dr. Pagano earned his medical degree and a specialty diploma in Molecular Endocrinology in 1990 from the University of Naples Federico II in his native Naples, Italy. He subsequently completed postdoctoral training at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany.
He joined the NYU School of Medicine in 1996 and was awarded tenure in 2003. Over the course of his career, Dr. Pagano has received numerous prestigious honors, including a MERIT Award from the National Cancer Institute (2006-2017) and an NIGMS MIRA Award (2020-2030), recognizing his significant contributions to cell and cancer biology.
Dr. Pagano has authored more than 250 influential publications, holds eight patents, and has delivered over 300 invited lectures at leading conferences, universities, and research institutions worldwide. His research focuses on ubiquitylating enzymes that regulate cell proliferation and how their dysregulation contributes to malignant transformation. His long-term goal is to advance the development of novel anticancer therapies. In particular, his laboratory is working to identify small-molecule “glues” that induce the degradation of previously untargetable oncoproteins.
Dr. Pagano is also a co-founder of two biotechnology companies. Mitotix Inc. was among the first to develop CDK inhibitors as anticancer agents and was later acquired by GPC Biotech. SEED Therapeutics, co-founded in collaboration with Dr. Ning Zheng (University of Washington) and Dr. Avram Hershko (Technion, Israel Institute of Technology), focuses on targeted protein degradation technologies.
Muzammal Husein
NYU
Muzammal Hussain is a Postdoctoral Scientist in the laboratory of Dr. Michele Pagano at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, where his research focuses on targeted protein degradation and molecular-glue drug discovery. He received his Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and subsequently trained at the Center for Chemical Biology and Drug Development, Chinese Academy of Sciences, gaining expertise in structure-based drug discovery, large-scale in silico and biochemical screening, and experimental and mechanistic characterization of small-molecule hits. At NYU, his work has focused on developing high-throughput screening strategies for targeted protein degradation and applying them to challenging oncology targets. His current research efforts are centered on the discovery and mechanistic characterization of cyclin D1 molecular glue degraders and their advancement toward therapeutic development.
November 5th, 2026
Host: Sean
Extracellular Targeted Protein Degradation
Jim Wells
UCSF
Jim Wells received his BA degrees in biochemistry and psychology from University of California, Berkeley, PhD in biochemistry from Washington State University from Ralph Yount, and Post-doc at Stanford University School of Medicine with George Stark. He began his independent research career in 1982 as a co-founding member of the Protein Engineering Department at Genentech where his group pioneered “gain-of-function engineering” of enzymes, hormones and antibodies. Several biologic products derived directly from these efforts, including engineered proteases, a therapeutic hGH antagonist, and VEGF blocking antibody for cancer.
In 1998, Dr Wells then co-founded Sunesis Pharmaceuticals where he was CSO, and president. At Sunesis, the group developed a novel technology, Tethering, for targeted small molecule drug discovery. The efforts of that group produced a drug for dry eye disease and new RAF inhibitor for cancer and several other compounds for clinical development in cancer.
In 2005, Wells joined the faculty of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Cellular & Molecular Pharmacology at UCSF. He founded the Small Molecule Discovery Center and served as Chair of Pharmaceutical Chemistry. The Wells Lab now investigates how cell surface proteomes change in health and disease by applying mass spectrometry and protein and antibody engineering, to understand and disrupt human-disease-associated signaling processes. He has co-founded half a dozen other companies, most recently EpiBiologics focused on developing extracellular degraders to remove disease causing proteins.
He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Inventors, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
November 19th, 2026
Host: Hubert / Sean
Elijah Mena
UT Southwestern Medical Center
Elijah received a B.S. in Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. During his doctoral training in the laboratory of Michael Rape, he defined a protein quality control pathway by which cells monitor the integrity of a conserved protein dimerization domain. As a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Stephen Elledge at Harvard Medical School, Elijah applied genetic screening approaches to uncover mechanisms of protein degradation, including a key ubiquitin-independent pathway that had remained poorly understood for decades. In December 2025, Elijah joined the faculty at UT Southwestern Medical Center as an Assistant Professor and Endowed Scholar in Medical Science. He is the recipient of the NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award and a Recruitment Award from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT).
Will Rosencrans
NIH
STING is suppressed by an ATG9A-ATG13-ATG101-dependent Golgi to Lysosome
TBD
December 3rd, 2026
Host: Sean / Mikolaj
Angel Ni
Harvard University
Angel Ni received her bachelor's degree in Chemistry from UCLA with a minor in Biomedical Research. She worked in the Rachelle Crosbie lab, where she researched the interactions between cardiac fibroblasts and the extracellular matrix that affect adhesion, activation, proliferation, and remodeling in Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. In the Christina Woo lab, she integrates proteomics, genetic screens, and biochemical methods to study the CRBN-ligandable proteome.
Simon Shen
Harvard University
Mapping the degron-degrader interaction landscape by scalable combinatorial screening
Simon recently completed his PhD advised by Prof. Brian Liau, in the Harvard Chemical Biology program, and supported by an NIH F31 fellowship and an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. He received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard in Chemistry and Physics with a secondary in Computer Science. He is broadly interested in inventing new functional genomics technologies along with tailored computational frameworks that together are powered to reveal new insights into molecular interactions in biology.