Confirmed Speakers

Elliott Nickbarg received his undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago and a doctorate in Chemistry from Harvard University. After completing a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, he joined Genetics Institute, Inc. of Cambridge MA (later part of Wyeth Pharmaceuticals) and worked on applications of proteomics technology. He then joined Neogenesis Pharmaceuticals (later part of Schering-Plough) and helped to develop applications for the ALIS screening system, and has continued to apply ALIS and related technologies as part of the Quantitative Biosciences department at Merck Research Laboratories in Boston MA. He has approximately 25+ years of experience doing drug discovery in Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical companies.

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Damian Houde, PhD. is a Principal Scientist within the Early Research department at Relay Therapeutics. Prior to that Damian was the Director of Process Analytics at Codiak BioSciences in Cambridge, MA (2016-2018). He also worked as a scientist at Biogen in Cambridge, MA for 14 years (2002-2016). His technical areas of expertise are concentrated in the separation and physical sciences associated with the characterization of biopolymers. Much of his work has centered on assessing the physicochemical properties, microheterogeneity, and aggregation propensity of proteins using mass spectrometry, chromatography, light scattering, and various forms of spectroscopy. His responsibilities have focused on providing biophysical information on the higher-order structure and structural dynamics of proteins and the development and evaluation of analytical tools such as HDX-MS to support this. Damian attended Northeastern University where he received a BS in Biology in 1998, a Graduate Certificate in Bioinformatics in 2004, and a PhD in Chemistry in 2010.

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Didier Roche, Ph.D., is Chief Scientific Officer at Edelris, a company he has co-founded in 2005. Edelris has pioneered the design and synthesis of Natural Product inspired libraries and is now developing a high throughput AS-MS screening platform for hit generation. Didier received his Ph.D. from the University of Strasbourg and joined for a post-doctoral position Novartis where he pursed his carrier as process-chemist. He moved back to medicinal chemistry after joining Merck KGaA where he led a group of 25 chemists for the diabetes division and contributed to the clinical development of 3 drug candidates. Didier has a broad interest for the development of new technologies in drug discovery.

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Dr Wenqing Shui graduated from Fudan University (Shanghai, China) with a master degree and received Ph.D. at University of California (Berkeley, U.S.A.). She had led an independent research group at Nankai University and later at Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, CAS, before she moved to ShanghaiTech University in 2016 and joined iHuman Institute as a Research Professor (PI). Her research group focusing on GPCR Omics and Ligand Discovery explores various proteomics and metabolomics techniques for ligand screening towards therapeutic protein targets, especially the GPCR superfamily. Her lab has built versatile mass spectrometry-based platforms for high-throughput screening of GPCR modulators as well as profiling the GPCR-targeted proteome related to CNS disorders.

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Short Biography: Dr. Roman Simon Roman studied Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and graduated after a research stay at the University of East Anglia, UK, in 2015. During his doctoral studies in the group of Prof. Manfred Jung, University of Freiburg, Germany, he developed in vitro assay systems and chemical probes for the screening and characterization of novel small molecule inhibitors of epigenetic targets with special focus on lysine acetyltransferases. In 2019, he obtained his Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical and Medicinal Chemistry from the Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg, Germany. Subsequently, he started his postdoctoral work in the High-Throughput Biology group at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma GmbH & Co.KG in Biberach, Germany, where he is responsible for the establishment and technological advancement of MALDI-TOF MS to enable label-free high-throughput screening and to provide insights into drug-protein interactions beyond the generic potency readout.

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Matthew D. Troutman, Ph.D.., is a Senior Director leading the Hit Discovery and Optimization (HDO) group within Medicine Design at Pfizer. His group is responsible for supporting Pfizer’s small molecule discovery portfolio through several mass spectrometry-based approaches. These include plate-based ADME and compound properties, discovery proteomics, native ESI and hit ID by Mass Spec (ASMS). In addition to portfolio research, the group is focused on progressing analytical technologies and compound assay technologies; focusing on science, technology and workflows. Matt received his Ph.D. in Pharmaceutics and a B.S. in Chemistry both from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Richard B. van Breemen is Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences in the College of Pharmacy, the Global Hemp Innovation Center, and the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University. He received his B.A. in Chemistry from Oberlin College and Ph.D. in Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics from the Johns Hopkins University. After post-doctoral research at Johns Hopkins University, he taught chemistry at North Carolina State University and medicinal chemistry and pharmacognosy at the University of Illinois College of Pharmacy before joining Oregon State University in 2018. His research concerns the discovery of pharmacologically active natural products using affinity selection-mass spectrometry, and the safety and efficacy of botanical dietary supplements.

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