Confirmed Speakers

Benoît Déprez received a degree of pharmaceutical sciences from the school of pharmacy of Lille and a PhD in medicinal chemistry in the Lab of André Tartar at the Institut Pasteur de Lille (1997).With André Tartar, he created the High Throughput Chemistry laboratory of the Institut Pasteur that became in 1997 the chemistry department of Cerep. In 1999, after 3 years spent at Cerep as Head of Chemistry and Site Manager, he was hired by Devgen, a Belgian start-up in Gent (Flanders), where he set up Drug Discovery activities using C.elegans. From 1995 on, he managed several collaborations between biotech or academic labs and pharmaceutical companies (GSK, Merck KGa, Sanofi, Genentech). Benoît Deprez is currently Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the Faculty of Pharmacy (U. Lille) and founder and director of Inserm Lab U761, now U1177 based at the Institut Pasteur de Lille and the Faculty of pharmacy. His research interests primarily focus on early drug discovery : target validation, medicinal chemistry and pharmacokinetic. Areas explored by his team are infectious diseases, metabolic diseases, and cancer using a molecular approach and cutting edge screening technologies including high throughput cell imaging. Benoit is correspondent member of the Académie Nationale de Pharmacie. In 2013, he founded APTEEUS with Terence Beghyn, a company focused on personalized drug discovery for rare monogenic diseases. In 2016, APTEEUS was a recipient of Individualized Medecine Award at the Concours Mondial d’Innovation. In June 2018, he was appointed as Scientific Advisor to the Board of the Institut Pasteur de Lille, then, in March 2019, as Scientific Director of the Institut Pasteur de Lille. Three candidate drugs discovered in his lab are currently licenced for clinical development to biotech and pharmaceutical companies.

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Gerhard currently holds the CSO position at Anavo Therapeutics, a young biotech company focussing on allosteric phosphatase modulators. He has proven expertise in small-molecule drug discovery and strong entrepreneurial skills supported by 25 years of practical and managerial experience in the European pharmaceutical, transatlantic biotech, and CRO industries. Throughout his career, Gerhard has worked on a wide range of different target classes in numerous disease areas. Gerhard’s expert knowledge in drug discovery, specifically in medicinal chemistry allowed him to establish novel design and optimization paradigms, proven by over 80 peer-reviewed publications. Prior to founding Anavo, he co-founded Gotham Therapeutics in New York, and held key positions at Mercachem (today Symeres), GPC Biotech, Axxima Pharmaceuticals, Glaxo in Italy, Bayer AG in Germany, and Organon in the Netherlands. Gerhard received his PhD in organic chemistry from the Technical University of Munich, where he worked with Prof. Dr. Horst Kessler on anti-adhesive integrin antagonists. Since more than 10 years, Gerhard is the organizer of the bi-annual Medicinal Chemistry Course in Leysin, held by the swiss chemical society.

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Bert Beerkens is a PhD student at the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research, Leiden University. Here he works together with prof. Adriaan IJzerman and dr. Daan van der Es on the development and application of new small molecules to study the adenosine receptors. This combines work in the fields of synthetic chemistry, pharmacology, biochemistry and chemical biology. Bert obtained his MSc degree in chemistry in 2018, having worked in the groups of Mario van der Stelt (Leiden University) and Stephan Hacker (TU München). His current interests lie at the interface of chemical biology and medicinal chemistry, investigating small molecules that offer new approaches to examine proteins.

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Kaja Borup Løvschall successfully obtained her PhD in Chemistry from Aarhus University, Denmark in October 2020 under the supervision of Prof. Alexander Zelikin. Her PhD dissertation was focused on developing artificial receptors for potential use in cell-based drug delivery systems. Her BSc and MSc studies in Medicinal Chemistry were likewise performed in the lab of Prof. Zelikin, which has so far led to nine shared publications. After obtaining her PhD, she went abroad for a postdoctoral researcher position in the group of Prof. Frederik Wurm at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research and Twente University. She recently returned to Denmark as a postdoctoral researcher at the Technical University of Denmark working with Prof. Thomas Andresen on drug delivery systems. Her research interests are especially focused on drug delivery, prodrug design, and artificial biology using her broad experience from organic synthesis to biological evaluation. She is volunteering in the organization ‘everyday sexism project Denmark’ to create awareness of gender-based discrimination, which is observed everywhere in the society.

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Sanja Djokic is a Ph.D. student of Chemistry at the Faculty of Science, University of Novi Sad, Serbia. She is working on her doctorate under the mentorship of associate professor Jovana Francuz. Sanja is employed as an assistant at the Department of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Environmental Protection at the aforementioned faculty. She is engaged in performing experimental exercises in the subjects of Medical Chemistry, Bioorganic Chemistry and The Development of Antitumor Drugs. She is a member of the group of professors Velimir Popsavin, otherwise an academician of the Serbian Academy of Sciences. Her research interests are the total synthesis of natural products and their analogs and the synthesis of biologically active compounds. She is a co-author of two papers published in international journals (M21, M22), two announcements at international conferences (M34), as well as eight announcements at national conferences, of which a total of four are oral presentations. During the final year of undergraduate studies, as well as the final year of master’s studies, she was a scholarship holder of the Fund for Young Talents of the Republic of Serbia - "Dositeja". During her studies, she was a scholarship holder of the "Dr. Milan Jelic" fund. In 2017, she was awarded special recognition by the Serbian Chemical Society for exceptional success during her studies. She is a member of the Serbian Young Chemists’ Club and the Serbian Chemical Society.

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Floriane Eshak graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Pharmacy from the German University in Cairo, Egypt in 2018. Passionate about research and development in the field of drug discovery, she graduated with a Master’s degree in In Silico Drug Design from University of Paris, France in 2020. In 2021, she started her Ph.D. at the university Paris Cité, working on analyzing and developing nanobodies binding to metabotropic glutamate receptors using in silico tools. Floriane’s Ph.D. is supervised by Dr. Bruno Gasnier (University Paris Cité), Dr. Anne Goupil (Biovia, Dassault Systèmes), and Dr. Francine Acher (University Paris Cité), and funded by the National research agency.

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Margarida Espadinha graduated in Applied Chemistry (Organic Chemistry field) in 2013 from the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the New University of Lisbon and, in 2015, obtained her MSc degree in Bioorganic Chemistry at the same University. After a short stay at the Institute of chemistry CNRS (Nice, France), under a STSM-CM1106 supported by the Cost Action, she started a research grant funded by pharmaceutical company Hovione in colaboration with Santos’ group at the Faculty of Pharmacy of University of Lisbon. In October 2021, she completed a PhD in Pharmacy at the Faculty of Pharmacy of University of Lisbon. During her PhD, she worked on the development of novel p53 activators by targeting p53 protein-protein interactions as an anticancer approach, under the supervision of Prof. Maria M. M. Santos, Prof. Stuart J. Conway and Prof. Cecília Rodrigues. As part of her PhD project, she spent 6 months in the Conway Lab at the University of Oxford, UK, where she worked on the targeted protein degradation field. In November 2021, she joined the Medicinal Chemistry group at the University of Antwerp, in Belgium, as Postdoctoral Research Fellow. The current focus of her work is to investigate and develop selective serine dipeptidyl peptidase inhibitors and bivalent chemical degraders for cancer therapy, under the supervision of Prof. Pieter Van Der Veken.

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Norman Hoster is an industrial PhD candidate at Umeå University, Sweden, the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) and at the Swedish Armed Forces, in the field of medicinal chemistry. He obtained his bachelor's degree at the Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany, in 2016, working in the group of Prof. Jörg Pietruszka at the Jülich Research Centre on biocatalysts for organic synthesis. After a research stay in the group of Prof. Bård Helge Hoff at the NTNU Trondheim, Norway, in 2017, working on CSF1R and EGFR kinase inhibitors, he completed my master studies at the University of Düsseldorf in 2018, working in the group of Prof. Constantin Czekelius on natural products targeting amyloid formation. Later that year, he started his industrial PhD studies in Umeå, Sweden, in the groups of Anna Linusson (Umeå University) and Fredrik Ekström (Swedish Defence Research Agency) in coorporation with the Swedish Armed Forces. His research combines medicinal chemistry, organic chemistry, computational chemistry and enzymology, focusing on the development of novel medical countermeasures against chemical warfare agents. Norman has won the European Industrial Doctoral School poster research prize in 2019 and the Swedish Pharmaceutical Society poster research prize in 2022.

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Amalia Kalampaliki is going to complete her Ph.D. thesis this autumn in the field of Medicinal chemistry, at Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Athens. She studied Pharmacy at the same Faculty, where she also attended the one and a half- year program of postgraduate studies (MSc) in Medicinal Chemistry to expand her specialization in the field of Synthetic Medicinal Chemistry. Her main research interests focus on the design and synthesis of heterocyclic compounds with therapeutic interest. During her Ph.D., she was granted with a MSCA and visited Spain, where she was trained in analytical techniques. She also received an H.F.R.I. fellowship for her Ph.D. research work, as well as DAAD and EMBO short term fellowships to visit Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, where she worked in the biochemistry field and trained on biological assays. Within her research career, she worked as an assistant in laboratories of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, she supervised several undergraduate and master students and gained teaching experience. She has also attended several national and international conferences where she presented her research work.

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Deniz Lengerli graduated from Gazi University, Faculty of Pharmacy (Turkey) in 2015. She completed her PhD at the same department in pharmaceutical chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Erden Banoglu. She is interested in developing small molecule drugs for cancer and her work involves designing and synthesizing 2,4-diaminopyrmidine derivatives as potential anticancer drug candidates.

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Francesco Merlino graduated with honors in Pharmacy at the Department of Pharmacy, University of Naples “Federico II” (Naples, Italy) in 2010. He completed his PhD studies in Pharmaceutical Sciences at the same department in 2014, after having spent a one-year research period at the Département de Chimie, Université de Montréal (Montreal, Canada), as visiting PhD student (2013). During post-doctoral studies Dr. Merlino was visiting scientist at the Department of Pharmaceutical and Medicinal Chemistry, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (Dublin, Ireland) for a short period between 2018-2019, and since 2020 he is Assistant Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the Department of Pharmacy, University of Naples “Federico II”. The research activity of Dr. Merlino in the field of medicinal and peptide chemistry is mainly focused on the development of peptidomimetic molecules which may act as modulators of biological targets involved in relevant pathophysiological conditions. His most recent projects have focused on the design and synthesis of peptide-based antimicrobials for the development of new agents that can counteract the phenomenon of antibiotic resistance.

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Manon Mirgaux is a PhD student in the Laboratory of Structural Biological Chemistry (CBS) at the University of Namur. Her thesis, under the supervision of Prof. Johan Wouters, focuses on the fundamental study of two therapeutic targets of the kynurenine pathway (hIDO1 and hIDO2) involved in immunosuppression phenomena. In particular, Manon focuses on the dynamics of these two proteins, a subject she has always been passionate about since her master thesis.

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Jade Nguyen is a Research Scientist in human brain tissue labeling and mapping at the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering in Geneva, Switzerland. In this new position, she is developing novel labels enabling multiplex tissue profiling, creating molecular markers maps, and applying techniques to healthy and diseased tissues to elucidate disease mechanisms. Jade holds a BSc in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering from EPFL, a MSc in Chemistry from ETHZ and obtained a PhD in Chemical Biology from ETHZ/EPFL in 2021 with a focus on redox biology. During this time, she developed chemical biology tools to induce and study redox stress responses in living human cells using synthetic chemistry, fluorescence imaging, cell and molecular biology.

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Doroteja Novak was born in 1993 in Novo mesto, Slovenia. She obtained her Master of Pharmacy degree at Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Ljubljana in 2017. Afterwards, she continued to pursue her PhD at the University Medical Centre of Ljubljana, under the guidance of prof. dr. Marko Anderluh, PhD, and Assist. Prof. dr. Petra Kolenc, PhD. She successfully defended her doctoral thesis and was awarded in Pharmaceutical Sciences in October 2021. Currently, she is employed at the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Ljubljana, as a researcher, continuing to work on the development of novel radiopharmaceuticals for theranostic approach in managing malignancies with cholecystokinin-2/gastrin receptor overexpression.

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Dr. Pockes studied Pharmacy at the University of Regensburg from 2005. He graduated in 2011 with the 3rd state exam after completing the pharmaceutical practical year in Berlin/Germany. There he worked in the pharmaceutical industry at Berlin-Chemie AG (quality control) and in a public pharmacy. With the 3rd state exam he also received the pharmaceutical license (Approbation). He then went back to Regensburg to start his doctoral thesis in medicinal chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Sigurd Elz. He worked there on the development of new histamine receptor ligands and received his PhD in 2015. After a post-doc period, he founded his own research group in 2018 with meanwhile five PhD students. Besides his projects on G-protein-coupled receptors (histamine, dopamine receptors, orphan GPCRs), since 2019 he is dedicated to the development of caspase-2 inhibitors in collaboration with Prof. Karen Ashe and Prof. Michael Walters (University of Minnesota). His research is focused on the development of new drugs for neurodegenerative disorders, e.g. Alzheimer’s disease. Funded by a DFG research grant, he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota for one year from 2020-2021. After his return to Regensburg, he just received the Innovation Award Medicinal Chemistry 2022 awarded by the Medicinal Chemistry Division of the German Chemical Society (GDCh) together with the Pharmaceutical/Medicinal Chemistry Division of the German Pharmaceutical Society (DPhG). From April - September 2022, he is on a research sabbatical at the University of Barcelona in the group of Prof. Rafael Franco. Dr. Pockes is a certified expert pharmacist in pharmaceutical analysis, a radiation protection commissioner, a project leader and a commissioner for biological safety according to „German Gene Technology Law“ and has training in laboratory animal science & animal welfare. Dr. Pockes is teaching pharmacists as a lecturer in “Organic Chemistry for Pharmacists” and in “Medicinal Chemistry”. Steffen Pockes has published 22 scientific papers (16 as corresponding author), participated in conferences with eleven oral presentations (six as invited speaker) and 32 poster presentations.

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Qais Jaber of Tel-Aviv University carries out his research in chemical biology under the supervision of Prof. Micha Fridman. He obtained his B.Sc. (2016) and M.Sc. (2018) in Chemistry from Tel-Aviv University with high distinction. His research focuses on developing new antifungal agents and novel molecular tools, such as live-cell fluorescent imaging as probes for deciphering the mode of action of fungal pathogens. He published his results in Angewandte Chemie, ACS Chemical Biology, European Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, ACS Central Science, ChemBioChem, Genetics, and JACS. In 2020 he won the Lois and Martin Whitman Scholarship Fund for outstanding Ph.D. students and the Emanuel Peled Prize for excellent Ph.D. students. In 2021 he won the David and Paulina Trotsky Foundation Award for Ph.D. students’ excellence and the Israel chemical society (ICS) Prize for an Excellent Graduate Student.

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Hrvoje Rimac was born in 1988 in Zagreb, Croatia. He obtained his Master of Pharmacy degree at Faculty of Pharmacy and Biochemistry in 2011 and his Master Engineer of Molecular Biotechnology degree at Faculty of Food Technology and Biotechnology in 2013. He also received the City of Zagreb Scholarship and Rector's Award in the category “Individual Scientific Achievement”. He successfully defended his doctoral dissertation entitled “Competition Between Flavonoids and Selected Xenobiotics for Binding Sites on Human Serum Albumin” in 2017 (summa cum laude), under the guidance of Assist. Prof. Mirza Bojić, PhD and Full Prof. Branka Zorc, PhD.
He won the French Government scholarship for a short research stay at the National Institute for Agricultural Research (fr. Institut national de la recherche agronomique, INRA) in Avignon, France in 2014 and in the academic year 2019/2020 he was employed as a postdoctoral fellow at the South Ural State University (SUSU), Laboratory of Computational Modeling of Drugs, Chelyabinsk, Russian Federation.
Currently, he is a course leader of a graduate level course “Drug Metabolism” and is collaborator in courses “Medicinal Chemistry 1” and “Drug Design” at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Pharmacy and Biochemistry. He is also a leader of elective graduate level courses “Biochemical Basis of Toxicity of Endobiotics and Xenobiotics” and “Medicinal Chemistry” and is one of the authors of the University textbook “Introduction to Computational Chemistry and Drug Design” (2020).
Hrvoje Rimac has published 22 scientific articles (first author – seven articles, corresponding author – six articles) and three professional papers. He also participated in scientific conferences with two invited lectures, five oral presentations, and 25 poster presentations, and was a Topic and Guest Editor in the Pharmaceutics journal special edition “Covalent Inhibitors as Selective Drug Candidates“.
In 2020 he won the Faculty of Pharmacy and Biochemistry, University of Zagreb’s The Best Young Scientist Award and in 2021 he won the Croatian Chemical Society’s The Best Young Scientist Award in the Field of Pharmaceutical and Medicinal Chemistry. He is a member of Croatian Chemical Society, Croatian Society of Chemical Engineers, and Croatian Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Area of his scientific interest involve computational design of bioactive molecules and molecular dynamics, computational and experimental investigation of interactions between ligands and macromolecules, and inhibition and induction of cytochrome P450 enzymes.

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Pau Nadal received his Pharmacy degree from the University of Barcelona (UB). As an undergraduate, he collaborated a research assistant in Prof. Escolano’s research group. After graduation, he joined Glaxo Smith Kline (Stevenage, UK) through a one-year Industrial Placement, where he worked in the MedChem department as a synthetic chemist and gained extensive insight into the Pharmaceutical R&D field in general and the drug discovery process in particular. In October 2020 he joined the Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmacology laboratory at UB and started his PhD thesis under the supervision of Prof. Rodolfo Lavilla and Prof. Carmen Escolano. His thesis is focused on drug discovery through the study and development of new multicomponent reactions (MCRs), with the objective of obtaining new compounds with potential biomedical applications. Particularly, his interests lie in the use of isocyanide based MCRs to develop fluorescent probes.

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I am currently working as a PhD student in the Micklefield group at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology at the University of Manchester. My work has primarily been focused within the field of biocatlaysis, wherein I have been investigating new enzymatic approaches to amide bond formation. I received my undergraduate degree from the University of Manchester, where I attained an MChem in Chemistry with Medicinal Chemistry with 1st class honours.

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Petr Slechta received his Master of Pharmacy degree from the Charles University (Czech Republic) in 2020. Since then, he is studying his PhD in Medicinal Chemistry at Faculty of Pharmacy in Hradec Kralove, Department of pharmaceutical chemistry and pharmaceutical analysis in the research group of prof. Martin Dolezal at the Charles University. His research is mainly focused on in sillico design and synthesis of free boronic acids and benzo[c][1,2]oxaborol-1(3H)-ol derivatives as potential antimicrobials.

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Dr Tomasz Wichur studied chemistry at the Faculty of Chemistry, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland (2012 B.Sc., 2014 M.Sc.). From 2015 to 2020 he attended Ph.D. studies in medicinal chemistry at the Faculty of Pharmacy, Jagiellonian University Medical College in Kraków. During this time, he was on a 6-month research stay at Julius Maximillian University in Würzburg (Germany) as the scholarship holder of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). In 2020 he defended PhD thesis entitled “Synthesis and characterization of novel multifunctional ligands aiming at symptoms and causes of Alzheimer's disease” prepared under supervision of Prof. Anna Więckowska. Since 2020 dr Tomasz Wichur has been working as the postdoctoral researcher in the team of Prof. Anna Więckowska in the project entitled „Multitarget approach to break the vicious circle of tau pathology and neuroinflammation in Alzheimer’s disease: development of dual inhibitors of GSK-3β and IKK-β kinases”, in the Department of Physicochemical Drug Analysis, Faculty of Pharmacy, Jagiellonian University Medical College. In his postdoctoral research Dr Tomasz Wichur is mainly focused on the design and chemical synthesis of novel, biologically active substances.

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