Cryo-EM in Drug Discovery | Virtual Edition

Professor Paul Midgley FRS is Head of Department and Professor of Materials Science in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy in the University of Cambridge. Until his appointment as HoD he was Director of the Wolfson Electron Microscope Suite. His research interests lie primarily in transmission electron microscopy and in recent years has focused on the development of electron tomography, electron crystallography and 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.

Chris 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.

Prof. 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.

Chun-wa 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 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 Jeremy Rees 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 an 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.

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.

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.