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
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
William Rosencrans is a biochemist and cell biologist whose research focuses on cellular quality-control pathways that protect organelle function and regulate innate immunity. He received his B.A. in Physics, from Colgate University, and completed his doctoral training in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Caltech working under Dr. David Chan, Dr. Tsui-Fen Chou and Dr. Richard Youle at NIH. Now a post-doctoral fellow in the lab of Richard Youle within the Center for Alzheimer's and Related Dementia. His work has spanned mitochondrial quality control, autophagy, and innate immune signaling, with an emphasis on uncovering mechanistic principles that can be translated into therapeutic strategies.
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.