RNA as a target for the life sciences

Prof Anh Tuan Phan

Nanyang Technological University

Dr Anh Tuan Phan obtained a PhD in Biophysics from École Polytechnique, France in 1999 (under the supervision of Dr Maurice Guéron and Dr Jean-Louis Leroy). He took up a research scientist position at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York (with Dr Dinshaw Patel). He joined the faculty of Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore) in 2006 and is now holding the Lee Soo Ying Professorship in Biological Physics. His group has made significant contributions in understanding non-canonical nucleic acid motifs, particularly the i-motif and the G-quadruplex. Recently, his research focuses on the development structure-enhanced (SEA) nucleic acid therapeutics. Dr Phan was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS).

Dr Beth Thomas

Storm Therapeutics

Beth has over 20 years of experience in medicinal and computational chemistry. She is currently working at STORM Therapeutics as Director, Medicinal Chemistry where she been since its inception. STORM Therapeutics is the first company to target the entirely new area of RNA modifying enzymes and has recently announced a first-in-class clinical candidate targeting METTL3.
Beth has also worked at Celltech, UCB, BioFocus, University of Cambridge and the Cambridge Crystallogarphic Data Centre. She completed her B.Sc. in Chemistry at the University of St Andrews followed by a Ph.D. in polyketide biosynthesis with Profs. Staunton and Leadlay at the University of Cambridge.

Dr Daniel Palacios

Novartis

Daniel Palacios obtained his B.S. from the University of California at San Diego (2005) and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign with Prof. Marty Burke (2011). Subsequently, he joined the Global Discovery Chemistry organization at the Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research where he has worked in chemical biology and medicinal chemistry groups, leading projects ranging from hit and target identification to lead optimization and clinical candidate selection. He is currently a Senior Principal Scientist investigating novel therapeutic modalities for neurological diseases.

Dr Kamal Azzaoui

Saverna Therapeutics

Kamal Azzaoui received his PhD in computational chemistry from the University of Orléans followed by two postdocs at McGill University and Georgetown University. He also holds a Master for Advanced Science (MAS) from the Swiss Institute for Translational and Entrepreneurial Medicine (sitem-insel, university of Bern). He worked for more than 15 years in pharmaceutical industry in charge of data analysis, data modeling, drug design using machine learning, cheminformatics and molecular modeling tools. Since 2017, he is the CEO and co-founder of Saverna Therapeutics, a Swiss start-up aiming to discover drugs for non-coding RNAs targets.

Dr Iris Alroy

Animabiotech

Dr Iris Alroy has broad background and more than 20 years of experience in small molecule drug discovery, preclinical development, and development of IND-enabling studies. Dr. Alroy was VP of Discovery at Proteologics, where she established several research programs for the identification of small molecules inhibiting the activity of E3 ubiquitin ligases in HIV-1 and Cancer. Subsequently, she was VP R&D at Pharmos Corp., in which she managed organic and medicinal chemistry, biology and pharmacology groups. Dr. Alroy was also entrepreneur and CEO of startup biotech companies, Fusimab, Ltd., ProMining Therapeutics Ltd., developing bispecific antibodies and small molecules, respectively.

Dr Jon Hall

ETH Zürich – Pharmaceutical Chemistry

Jonathan Hall received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at Imperial College in London in 1988. He did post-doctoral work with J.-M. Lehn in Strasbourg (FR)and with Y. Kishi in Cambridge (USA). He joined the nucleic acids section at Ciba Central Research Labs in Basel in 1992 and in 2000 he was promoted to head the group. In 2003 he was presented with the Novartis Leading Scientist Award. In 2007 he joined the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the ETH as Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and in 2012 he served as Chairman of the Institute. A principal goal of his inter-disciplinary group at the ETH is to help bring RNA as a drug and a target into mainstream pharmaceutical
research.

Dr Kevin Weeks

University of North Carolina / Ribometrix

Dr Kevin Weeks is a Kenan Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The vision of his laboratory is to use chemical principles to explore the central role of RNA in biology with a focus on real-world problems and understanding human disease. RNA SHAPE and single-molecule RING technologies, invented in his laboratory, are used worldwide. Dr Weeks is a Fulbright and a Searle Scholar, an NIH EUREKA awardee, a Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science, the founder of Ribometrix, and has taught many hundreds of undergraduates first year chemistry.

Prof Matt Disney

Scripps Research

Matt Disney is currently Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Scripps Research on the Florida Campus. His laboratory works in the area of small molecule targeting of RNA. The lab studies regarding molecular recognition events between RNA folds and small molecules to attempt to solve problems of biomedical importance. The lab’s research has garnered various awards including the Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences, Barry Cohen Award in Medicinal Chemistry, NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award, the Eli Lily Award in Biological Chemistry, the David W. Robertson Award in Medicinal Chemistry, and others.