Karin Briner Vice President, Global Discovery Chemistry, Novartis Karin leads Global Discovery Chemistry at Novartis and has responsibility for discovery chemistry research globally across all disease areas, focusing with her team on delivering a continuous stream of first-in-class and differentiated molecules to the clinic. Throughout her career, Karin has stayed close to the scientific experiment, contributing as inventor and maintaining her own chemistry laboratory still when she had responsibilities as Executive Director. She serves as member of several advisory boards to support initiatives in the public and scientific community and has regularly served as a symposium organizer and session chair for chemistry and medicinal chemistry conferences. She also participated in starting the Innovative Medicines Initiative as a member of efpia’s Research Directors Group in 2007-2010. Before joining Novartis in 2011, Karin was at Eli Lilly and Company, where she was Vice President of Translational Sciences and Technologies with responsibilities for biomarker discovery research, structural biology, and in vitro screening. Karin had started her industry career at Eli Lilly in Indianapolis as Senior Organic Chemist in Infectious Diseases. She led projects in Neuroscience and Endocrine Research, was Executive Director of Lead Optimization Chemistry, then Managing Director of the Lilly Research Centre in the UK and a member of the board of Eli Lilly and Co., Ltd. before returning to Indianapolis to lead Translational Sciences and Technologies. Karin obtained her BSc in chemistry and biochemistry and her PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Zurich, working with Professor Vasella. She did NSF and NIH postdoctoral studies with Professor Bill Roush at Indiana University.

Ad P. IJzerman, professor of medicinal chemistry at the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research, Leiden University, the Netherlands. Ad IJzerman is an expert on G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), an important class of drug targets. Over the years he has blended his medicinal chemistry background with computational and pharmacological approaches to unravel novel concepts in GPCR drug discovery. Gradually he developed the notion that GPCRs are "allosteric machines", which are activated and inhibited in many different ways. Principles studied by him such as intrinsic efficacy, insurmountable antagonism and residence time scratch the surface of what is known about this protein superfamily. His contributions to collaborative efforts in the structural biology of GPCRs, long thought out of reach, elucidated and visualized among others i) the unexpected binding orientation of an antagonist, ii) the sodium ion binding site on many GPCRs, and iii) the textbook-changing presence of two antagonists at the same time. Ad was trained as a pharmacist at Utrecht University, and obtained his PhD degree in medicinal chemistry at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam under the supervision of Henk Timmerman. Thereafter he moved to Leiden University, where he has been a professor since 2001.

Dr. Malin Lemurell is the Head of Head of Medicinal Chemistry in Cardiovascular, Renal and Metabolism at AstraZeneca Gothenburg, Sweden. Since 2013 she has been leading the department with 60+ Medicinal Chemists supporting the portfolio across multiple chemical modalities. Malin received her PhD at the Gothenburg University in 1999 in organic chemistry. After post-doctoral studies on metal catalyzed asymmetric oxidation at The Scripps Research Institute in California with Prof. Barry Sharpless, she joined AstraZeneca as a scientist and has subsequently held various leadership roles. Dr. Lemurell is an author of multiple publications and patents, including patents related to eg. Odevixibat and AZD5718 (Phase II). Her current interests include drug design across small molecules and New Modalities, targeted drug delivery, drugging RNA structure using small molecules and to develop drug hunters of the future.

Jean-Paul Clozel is a cardiologist educated in France, with further training in pharmacology and physiology at the University of Montreal, Canada, and the University of California, San Francisco. After eleven years as a clinician, he decided to move to applied research. During his 12 years at F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd, he was responsible for the selection of the first T-channel blocker. He also participated in the characterization of renin inhibitors as well as several endothelin receptor antagonists such as bosentan and clazosentan. Overall, the group he was heading discovered seven compounds that entered clinical trials. During his 25-year-career in cardiology, he has published widely in peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals. At the same time, his passion has remained unchanged: being involved as closely as possible in bringing innovative medicine to "his" patients. He has developed various, novel experimental models allowing the differentiation of these drugs, work honored with the 1997 Hoffmann-La Roche Research Prize. In 2007 he was nominated professor at the Collège de France in Paris, France (Chair of Technical Innovation). At the end of 1997, Jean-Paul founded Actelion, together with his wife, Martine, and work colleagues and friends Walter Fischli, Thomas Widmann and André J. Mueller. First mainly focusing on Research and Development, he became CEO of the company to bring Actelion to the public in April 2000. With the sale of Actelion to Johnson & Johnson in June 2017, the drug discovery and early clinical pipeline business was demerged and Idorsia was established. Idorsia, a new biopharmaceutical company, is specialized in the discovery and development of small molecules to provide innovative therapeutic options. Jean-Paul retains his role as CEO.

Valle Palomo is a Junior Leader researcher at the Centre for Biological Research CSIC in Madrid. She studied Chemistry and obtained her PhD from the Autónoma University of Madrid in 2012 in Organic Chemistry. She performed a postdoctoral research stay at The Scripps Research Institute with Prof. Dawson from 2013 to 2016. In 2018 she started her own group focused on Medicinal Chemistry, Chemical Biology and Nanotechnology. Her lab focuses on the understanding of neurodegenerative diseases, especially amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and in the discovery of novel agents for its treatment.

After completing his D.Phil. in 2008 at the University of Oxford, U.K., he undertook postdoctoral work at the Max-Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Germany, and the ETH Zürich, Switzerland, and worked as a Group Leader at Alfama Lda in Portugal. He started his independent research career in 2013 at the University of Cambridge as a Royal Society University Research Fellow. In 2018 he was appointed University Lecturer (Tenured) and recently has been promoted to Reader (Associate Professor). Gonçalo is the recipient of two European Research Council grants; a starting grant and a proof-of-concept grant, and was awarded the Harrison–Meldola Memorial Prize in 2016 and the MedChemComm Emerging Investigator Lectureship in 2018, both from the Royal Society of Chemistry. His research group interests focus on the use of chemistry principles to tackle challenging biological problems for understanding and fight cancer.

Pablo Rivera-Fuentes is assistant professor of chemical biology at EPF Lausanne. His laboratory works on the development of chemical and biological probes to visualize and control biological problems with sub-cellular precision. Prior to his appointment at EPFL, he was an independent group leader at ETH Zurich (2015–2019). His training includes a PhD in chemistry from ETH Zurich (2012), as well as postdoctoral training at MIT and the University of Oxford (2012–2015).

Valle Palomo is a Junior Leader researcher at the Centre for Biological Research CSIC in Madrid. She studied Chemistry and obtained her PhD from the Autónoma University of Madrid in 2012 in Organic Chemistry. She performed a postdoctoral research stay at The Scripps Research Institute with Prof. Dawson from 2013 to 2016. In 2018 she started her own group focused on Medicinal Chemistry, Chemical Biology and Nanotechnology. Her lab focuses on the understanding of neurodegenerative diseases, especially amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and in the discovery of novel agents for its treatment.

Leila Motiei obtained her M.Sc. in Chemistry from Bar-Ilan University, Israel in 2003. She then moved to the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California where she worked with Prof. M. Reza Ghadiri as a research assistant (2004–2006). Her research involved the study of antibacterial cyclic D,L-α-glycopeptides. In 2007, she returned to Israel to conduct her PhD studies at the Weizmann Institute of Science under supervision of Prof. Milko E. van der Boom studying the exponential formation of molecular-based assemblies. Since 2012, she has been an associate staff scientist in the group of Prof. David Margulies at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Her research interests focus on developing pattern-generating fluorescent molecular probes, turn-on fluorescent probes, targeted protein surface receptors, and biomimetics of signaling proteins.

Prof. Jian Zhang, Director of Medicinal Bioformatics Center in Shanghai Jiaotong Unversity School of Medicine. In the last ten years, he has made a series of cutting-edge breakthroughs in drug discovery, which were achieved through the development of allosteric drug design methods to identify new anti-cancer drug targets and discover first-in-class lead compounds. The representative works include: development and improvement of allosteric methods based on the induced fit of conformation, and precise identification of anti-cancer drug targets from clinical samples; discovery of first-in-class allosteric modulators for undruggable targets using our developed allosteric methods. He has published more than 150 papers in Nature, Nat Chem Biol, etc. Moreover, the developed allosteric methods from Prof. Zhang have been accessed by more than 60,000 users over 100 countries. More significantly, some of the first-in-class lead compounds developed by Prof. Zhang have been advanced into pre-clinical studies.

Sheng-Yong Yang, Dr., Professor of the State Key Laboratory of Biotherapy, West China Hospital, Sichuan University (Sichuan, China). Dr. Yang obtained his PhD degree from Sichuan University in 1999. Then, he did his postdoc research in Hongkong University of Science and Technology from 1999-2001. In 2002-2005, he worked in the University of Calgary (Alberta, Canada) as a research scientist. Since 2005, Dr. Yang has been working in the State Key Laboratory of Biotherapy, West China Hospital, Sichuan University. His research interests include computer aided drug discovery (CADD), medicinal chemistry, and small molecule drug R&D against cancer and immunological disease.

My name is Suzanne Sherihan SAHRAOUI, pharmacist by training, I obtained my Bachelor's and my Master's degrees in Pharmaceutical Sciences in 2018 at the University of Geneva and the Federal diploma the same year. I started my Ph.D in Pharmaceutical Sciences in 2019 in the Chemistry/Biochemistry department at the University of Geneva led by Prof. Scapozza. I am working in the field of neglected diseases and my project aim is to develop a new tool capable to identify targets of small molecules in parasites responsible of tropical diseases. In this frame 2019, I did an internship at The Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institut in Basel to acquire skills related to the handling of parasites such as Trypanosoma brucei brucei.

Barbara Monti obtained the PhD degree in Cell Biology and Physiology in 2001 at the University of Bologna (Italy), where she worked as post-doctoral fellow (2001-2006) and as researcher (2006-2014). During her PhD and post-doc, she spent several research periods at Brown University (Providence, RI, USA) and Lund University (Sweden). Since September 2014, BM has been appointed as Associate Professor at Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology, University of Bologna, Italy, where she leads the Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology group, which is mainly focused on the study of the interactions between neuronal and glial cells, especially microglia, in brain pathophysiology. For this purpose, many research projects in collaboration with various national and international research groups have been granted from Telethon, ALSA and other organizations. She is the author of more than 70 publications in peer-reviewed international scientific journals and has participated in numerous conferences.

Bernhard Wünsch studied Pharmacy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. After finishing the PhD and habilitation in the field of Pharmaceutical and Medicinal Chemistry, in became a professor for Pharmaceutical Chemistry in Freiburg and later in Münster. Currently, he is the director of the Institute of Pharmaceutical and Medicinal Chemistry in Münster. He is working on the development of novel ligands for various receptors such as glutamate, opioid and sigma receptors. Furthermore, he is interested in subtype selective modulation and imaging of ion channels. Since the target proteins have a particular 3D structure, the stereochemistry of the ligands plays a particular role in the projects. Relationships between structure, in particular stereochemistry, and affinity and activity are investigated.

Enza Lacivita is an Associate Professor in Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Bari Aldo Moro. After the degree in Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Technologies, she gained her Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Perrone at the University of Bari. In 2014, she joined the group of prof. Bojarski (IP-PAS, Krakow) as visiting scientist. Her research activity is focused on the development of small-molecule agents for various G-protein coupled receptors involved in neuronal plasticity and neuroinflammation with the aim to translate them into therapeutic agents for neurodevelopment disorders and neurodegenerative diseases. She is a member of the Executive Board of Biofordrug, a spin-off company committed to the identification of biomarkers for cancer and neurodegenerative disorders.

Dr. Astolfi research is mainly focused on the application/development of medicinal chemistry approaches towards the discovery (hit identification and hit-to-lead optimization) of new compounds of pharmaceutical interest such as anti-prion agents, kinase inhibitors, S. Aureus NorA efflux pump inhibitors and Dengue NS5 RNA-dependent RNA polymerase inhibitors. His contributions to these projects include the application/development of different medicinal chemistry approaches, such as chemical library design, in silico strategies to rationally discover new potent and safe bioactive compounds and physico-chemical and ADME-Tox profile prediction. Andrea Astolfi received MSc degree in Pharmaceutical Biotechnologies (110/110 cum laude) in 2014 from University of Perugia where it was awarded as one of the best graduate students. In 2018, at the same University, he earned a PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences. His PhD thesis work received the national award as the best PhD thesis in Medicinal Chemistry organized by Società Chimica Italiana (SCI) and the international Paul Ehrich MedChem Euro-PhD Network certificate for the excellence. Dr. Astolfi has a postdoctoral fellowship granted by “Fondazione Umberto Veronesi” at the University of Perugia.

Wiktor Szymanski received his PhD degree from The Warsaw University of Technology, Poland, in 2008, working under the supervision of Prof. Ryszard Ostaszewski. He spent two years working on the use of biotransformations in organic chemistry with Prof. Ben L. Feringa and Prof. Dick B. Janssen at the University of Groningen. Since 2010 he has been working on the construction of photoactive protein- peptide- and DNA-bioconjugates and photopharmacology in the Feringa Labs. In 2014, he joined the Department of Radiology, University Medical Center Groningen, where he was appointed in 2015 as tenure track assistant professor and in 2019 as associate professor.

Niyi completed his B.Sc. in Chemistry at Obafemi Awolowo University where he conducted undergraduate research under the direction of Professor Craig Obafemi and later moved to the US for graduate studies. He obtained his Masters in 2007 from Tennessee State University and completed two internships at Eli Lilly pharmaceutical company. He continued to the doctoral program at Vanderbilt University, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology under the mentorship of Prof. Craig Lindsley. In 2011, Niyi obtained his doctorate degree and moved to Harvard University as a UNCF/Merck postdoctoral fellow in the lab Prof. Matthew Shair’s laboratories at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. He joined Pfizer Inc., Groton in 2014, where he was a Principal Scientist with the Inflammation & Immunology-Rare Diseases division in World Wide Medicinal Chemistry. After 3 years at Pfizer, he joined the Molecular Discovery and Chemical Biology group at Merck Exploratory Science Center in Cambridge where he’s a Molecular Discovery and Chemical Biology Scientist and co-leads a team of multidisciplinary scientists that integrates chemistry and biology to study novel mechanistic basis of human diseases to develop new therapeutics.

André Campaniço is a PhD student at the Faculty of Pharmacy from the University of Lisbon. He has an Integrated Master's Degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences. André started to collaborate with the Department of Medicinal Chemistry of the Research Institute for Medicines iMed.ULisboa in the second year of his degree, participating in projects related with cancer, malaria and tuberculosis. In 2014, André was awarded with the 'Amadeu Dias' Research Grant for young researchers. In his final year, he spent three months at the School of Pharmacy from the University College of London, working with peptidomimetics with antibacterial potential. His PhD is on the development of new drug leads for tuberculosis and it is a collaboration with the University of Cape Town, where he spent two months in 2020. Throughout his research experience, André developed skills in medicinal and organic chemistry, microbiology, analytical chemistry, solubility and metabolic studies, photochemistry, cell-based assays and animal science.

Davia Prischich is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC, Barcelona). While studying Industrial Pharmacy at Sapienza – University of Rome, she joined the group of Prof. K. T. Wanner (Ludwig Maximilians Universität, Munich) to work as an undergraduate student in Medicinal Chemistry. She recently earned her PhD in Biomedical Biotechnology from the University of Barcelona under the supervision of Prof. Pau Gorostiza. Her research focused on the development and application of light-regulated peptides to inhibit protein-protein interactions as well as small molecules to control GPCRs function. Shortly, she will be joining the laboratory of Prof. Matthew Fuchter at Imperial College London to continue her postdoctoral studies in photopharmacology.

Dr Stacey Southall, Director of Biophysics at Sosei Heptares Current research interests are GPCR drug discovery, primarily the contribution of biophysical and structural data to SBDD. Her team provides biophysical data such as SPR and MS to support a variety of internal and collaborative GPCR drug discovery programs. They also form the cryo-EM arm of the Sosei Heptares structural biology platform, complementing our X-ray crystallography capabilities and enabling SBDD. She completed her PhD in Biochemistry at University of Cambridge and followed this with post-doctoral positions at UEA, Institute of Cancer Research and EMBL-Hamburg prior to joining Sosei Heptares in 2014.

Herbert Nar is Director of the Structural Research Group at the Boehringer Ingelheim German Research Centre Biberach. The group comprises units for protein expression and purification, biophysics of ligand binding, NMR, protein crystallography and cryo-EM. He graduated from the Technical University Munich in Chemistry and obtained his Ph.D. from the same institute. After postdoctoral work with Robert Huber at the Max-Planck-Institute für Biochemie, Martinsried, Germany, he joined Boehringer Ingelheim to establish a protein crystallography laboratory, before taking over responsibility for the Structural Research Group. He is author or co-author of >80 publications and >50 patents and was involved in numerous projects yielding clinical candidate chemical matter.

Judith Reeks is a senior research associate in the Molecular Sciences department of Astex Pharmaceuticals. Her main focus is using structural biology for drug discovery. She gained a PhD from the University of St Andrews in the lab of Prof. James Naismith, studying the structural biology of CRISPR-associated proteins. She then moved to the lab of Prof. Martin Noble and Prof. Jane Endicott in the Northern Institute for Cancer Research as a post-doctoral research associate to work on drug discovery projects. She joined Astex in 2015.

Currently, she is a researcher in the Structural Biology and Drug Discovery (Luecke) Group at Norwegian Center for Molecular Medicine in Oslo. As a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University, USA, she used biophysics and thermodynamics in a project related to environmental sustainability. She has worked as a postdoctoral researcher both at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics in Frankfurt, Germany and at CICbioGUNE, Spain during which she used structural biology and biophysics techniques in projects involving human health. Over the last few years, remarkable progress has been achieved in the field of Cryo-EM, resulting in structure determination at near-atomic resolution. She therefore believes that now is the perfect time to invest into and develop the field of Cryo-EM targeting important scientific problems that affect society at large.

Sergio Mallart is principal scientist, laboratory head, Emerging Chemical Modalities (ECM-IDD), Sanofi R&D Chilly Mazarin, France. His current research interests are the syntheses of novel lipid nanoparticles for RNA, DNA delivery and the use of peptides as GPCR agonists, protein-protein interaction inhibitors and for drug targeting. Sergio holds a PhD in organic chemistry under the supervision of professor Jean Pierre Genet (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, 1989). From 1990 to 1991 he followed postdoctoral studies in professor Barry M. Trost group at Stanford University, CA. In 1992, Sergio joined Synthélabo (now Sanofi) as a medicinal chemist working on inhibitors of serine proteases of the coagulation cascade. In 2005 he joined Sanofi-Aventis cardiovascular department as chemistry team leader for several programs on ion channels and GPCR for cardiovascular and fibrotic diseases. He is the co-author of 33 patent applications and publications.

Dr Gary Newton, recently joined the Institute of Cancer Research, as a Team Leader in medicinal chemistry. Prior to this role he was a Group Leader in medicinal chemistry at Domainex working in a range of therapeutic areas, including inflammation, cardiovascular disease and oncology. During this time he led a number of multi-disciplinary teams to discover pre-clinical candidates on behalf of Domainex’s clients. One such collaboration with Prof. Michael Schneider of Imperial College has led to the discovery of MAP4K4 inhibitors suitable for the treatment of myocardial infarction. Dr Newton studied chemistry at the University of Sheffield before completing his PhD in the asymmetric synthesis of tropane alkaloids with Prof. Varinder Aggarwal. After which time he joined OSI Pharmaceuticals working in oncology.

Thomas Thum is an internist and cardiologist. He studied medicine and received his PhD at the Imperial College, London. He is a full professor and director of the Institute of Molecular and Translational Therapeutic Strategies at Hannover Medical School (MHH) and since 2021 director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Toxicology and Experimental Medicine. He (co-) authored 400 publications and is a distinguished reviewer, board member, patent holder, and founder.

Dr Grace Chuang earned her Ph.D. in organic synthesis at State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook with Professor Iwao Ojima. She started her drug discovery journey with Bayer Pharmaceutical at West Haven, Connecticut for four years before she moved to her current position at Cytokinetics. She is currently a director of Medicinal Chemistry Department at Cytokinetics, which she has been for almost 17 years. Her current research at Cytokinetics focuses on modulating muscle contraction via the design of small molecules that interact with sarcomere proteins. Her first success came from the design and synthesis of reldesemtiv, a small molecule fast skeletal muscle troponin activator (FSTA), currently enrolling patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in Phase 3 clinical trial (COURAGE-ALS). She is responsible for the discovery of CK-3773274, a novel small molecule cardiac myosin inhibitor and CK-3772271, another cardiac myosin inhibitor. CK-3773274 has completed the Phase 2 clinical trial REDWOOD-HCM in patients with obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Positive topline results from REDWOOD-HCM inform the design of a Phase 3 clinical trial expected to begin before year-end. CK-3773271 has also completed a Phase 1 safety assessment. Through a collaboration agreement with Global Blood therapeutic (GBT) in 2012, Grace also helped discover oxybryta, an FDA approved drug for the treatment of sickle cell disease.

Susanne Roehrig Principal Scientist in Medicinal Chemistry Since 1999 Research Scientist in Medicinal Chemistry at Bayer AG Pharma, main areas of interest: cardiovascular diseases, thromboembolic disorders, proteases Postdoctoral Associate with Prof. Peter H. Seeberger, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA Studies in Chemistry, Diploma Thesis and Ph.D. with Prof. Wolfgang R. Roth and Prof. Peter Welzel, Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Universität Leipzig, Germany

Dr. Jörg T. Kley Principal Scientist @ Boehringer-Ingelheim Pharma, Biberach, Germany Head of a Medicinal Chemistry lab since 2000. Contributed to and lead numerous hit-to-lead and lead optimization projects in the areas of Oncology, Metabolic Diseases, and Respiratory Diseases • Studied chemistry at the University of Freiburg, Germany • PhD @ Tumor Biology Center, Freiburg: Synthesis of substrate analogous inhibitors of secretory phospholipase A2 (Prof. G. v. Kiedrowski) • 1998-2000 PostDoc @ Boehringer Ingelheim: Parallel synthesis to support H2L projects • 2002 (Feb-May): Visiting scientist @ Imperial College, London, in the group of Prof. Donald Craig. Working on synthetic methodology (Ireland-Claisen Rearrangements)

Magnus Nilsson is a principal scientist at Medicinal Chemistry, Respiratory, Inflammation and Autoimmunity (R&I) at AstraZeneca in Gothenburg, Sweden. He obtained his Ph.D in organic chemistry from the department of chemistry at Swedish University of Agricultural Science, Uppsala, Sweden in 1999. Between 1999 to 2011 he worked for Medivir AB, Huddinge, Sweden holding several positions within Medicinal chemistry, including lead chemist roles for Hepatitis C drug discovery projects in collaboration with scientists of Janssen Pharmaceutica. He joined AstraZeneca in 2012 as an associate director in Medicinal Chemistry and has since added experience from several drug discovery projects intended for inhaled administration. He enjoys the drug hunting process and has a track record of delivery of clinical candidates as well as co-inventorship on 35 patent applications and co-authorship on 20 publications in peer reviewed journals.

Dr. Giuseppe Cecere is a Principal Scientist currently working in the Medicinal Chemistry department at Hoffmann-La Roche/Basel. He joined Roche in 2011 and, during this time, he has been involved in a variety of projects in neuroscience with focus in psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders targeting GPCRs and ion channels. Giuseppe received his PhD in Organic Chemistry in 2008 at University of Cambridge (UK) working on total synthesis of complex marine natural products. After completion of these studies, he moved as postdoctoral fellow to the group of Professor David W.C. MacMillan (Princeton University, NJ) contributing to the nascent research area of photoredox organocatalysis. Giuseppe previously worked at IRBM/Merck/Rome as medicinal chemist where he was involved on the synthesis and design of HIV-Integrase inhibitors for the treatment of HIV infections.

Born and raised in Burma, Yimon Aye read chemistry at the University of Oxford (UK) (2000-04), and achieved her PhD degree in organic chemistry with Prof. David Evans at Harvard University (USA) (2004-09). She then switched research discipline and pursued her postdoctoral training in life sciences with Prof. JoAnne Stubbe. As a Damon Runyon cancer research fellow at MIT (USA) (2009-12), she established the mechanisms-of-action of therapeutics targeting the enzyme ribonucleotide reductase. In her independent career that began mid-2012, Yimon Aye set out to understand the detailed mechanisms of electrophile signaling. This impetus culminated in the development of “REX” technologies (T-REX™ delivery and G-REX™ profiling). In a parallel research program, she studies pathways involved in genome maintenance and nucleotide signaling, including the mechanisms of anticancer drugs in clinical use. In Autumn 2018, she and her team members established the Laboratory of Electrophiles and Genome Operation (LEAGO) at EPFL https://leago.epfl.ch/

Professor Paul Workman FRS FMedSci FRSC is Chief Executive and President of The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), London and Harrap Professor of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at ICR. He is the founding Director of the CRUK Convergence Science Centre at ICR and Imperial College. From 1997-2016 Paul was Director of the CRUK Centre for Cancer Therapeutics at ICR. Previously he was head of the cancer biology section at Zeneca Pharmaceuticals (now AstraZeneca) and before that he held academic positions at Leeds University, MRC Clinical Oncology Unit/Cambridge University, Stanford University, CRUK Beatson Laboratories/Glasgow University. Paul is an internationally recognized leader in the discovery of innovative molecularly targeted cancer drugs and chemical probes, including inhibitors of PI3 kinase, AKT, CDKs, HSP90 and the HSF1 pathway, and is the originator of the widely-used Pharmacologic Audit Trail for biomarker-led drug development. He has won numerous honours and awards for his research. He is a Board Director of the Chemical Probes Portal, Royal Marsden and Storm Therapeutics; was scientific founder of Chroma Therapeutics and Piramed Pharma (acquired by Roche); and is a Science Partner at Nextech.

Mario van der Stelt (1975) is professor and chair of the department of Molecular Physiology of the Leiden University (the Netherlands). He is a medicinal chemist and worked as a project leader for almost 8 years in the pharmaceutical industry (Merck Research Laboratories). He and his group discovered highly selective and peripherally restricted cannabinoid CB2 receptor agonists and the first brain active inhibitors for the biosynthesis of endocannabinoids. His group reported the off-target profile of the FAAH inhibitor BIA 10-2474 that killed a healthy volunteer in a phase 1 clinical trial in France in 2016. Dr. Van der Stelt received for his research the Prix Galien Research for best preclinical drug discovery research in the Netherlands (2017), the Young Investigator Award of the International Cannabinoid Research Society (2017) and a VICI-award from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (2018). He is elected as a senior investigator of Oncode Institute (2019) and (vice)-chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Cannabinoid Function in the CNS (2021-2023). Multidisciplinary collaboration is key in his research to connect chemistry and biology to discover drug candidates modulating the endocannabinoid system.

Christian Fischer obtained his Diplom in Chemistry from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich/Switzerland where he also conducted his Ph.D. research with Erick Carreira in the area of transition-metal catalysis. He then moved to the US for postdoctoral studies at MIT as a DAAD fellow with Gregory Fu where he developed several catalytic asymmetric reactions. In 2006 Christian joined Merck Research Labs in Boston as a medicinal chemist where he since contributed to several early and late stage drug discovery projects in Neuroscience, Inflammation and Oncology. Currently, he is a Distinguished Scientist in the Discovery Chemistry Department where his roles and responsibilities include leadership of discovery programs as well as external collaborations with partners and consortia. Christian has broad interest in Oncology drug discovery, in particular target identification/validation and LID projects that span a range of target classes, including epigenetic targets.

Rita Félix completed her Bachelor’s in chemistry (July 2013) and Master’s degree in Chemistry-Advanced and Industrial Chemistry (September 2015), both at University of Coimbra. Her master thesis was focused on the synthesis of thiazolidine derivatives as a novel class of organocatalysts. In January 2017 Rita moved to the Medicinal Chemistry group at iMed.ULisboa (Research Institute for Medicines of Faculdade de Farmácia da Universidade de Lisboa) to work as a research fellow developing structurally diverse four-membered ring compounds, which undergoing biological testing as inhibitors of Human Neutrophil Elastase. She also integrates the research team of ‘POINT4PAC: Oncologia de Precisão: Terapias e Tecnologias Inovadoras’, as a research fellow and dedicated to the synthesis of a plethora of diverse chemical scaffolds that target cancer stem cell lines (April 2018). Rita is currently a third-year PhD student at the Medicinal Chemistry Group of the Research Institute for Medicines, University of Lisbon, under the supervision of Professors Carlos Afonso and Rui Moreira, in collaboration with Professor Chris Schofield (Oxford). Her research is mainly focused on the design of quenched activity-based probes to detect enzymes in biological matrices, using a four-membered ring as a warhead.

Prof. Erick M. Carreira obtained a B.S. degree in 1984 from the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign under the supervision of Scott E. Denmark and a Ph.D. degree in 1990 from Harvard University under the supervision of David A. Evans. After carrying out postdoctoral work with Peter Dervan at the California Institute of Technology through late 1992, he joined the faculty at the same institution as an assistant professor of chemistry and subsequently was promoted to the rank of associate professor of chemistry in the Spring of 1996, and full professor in Spring 1997. Since September 1998, he has been professor of chemistry at the ETH Zürich in the Institute of Organic Chemistry. Since 2011, he has been also been a Member of the Competence Center for Systems Physiology and Metabolic Diseases at ETH-Zürich.

Carreira has authored over 340 publications and 36 patents. He has mentored in his laboratory 140 undergraduates, 100 doctoral students, and 79 post-doctoral associates. He has been associate editor with Organic Letters, Thieme Verlag (Synfacts and Synthesis), and Organic Synthesis. As of January 2019 he was assigned the role of Editor-in-Chief for Organic Letters. Together with colleagues at ETH Zurich he has co-founded three companies: Lipideon, SpiroChem, and Glycemicon. He is a consultant for companies in North America, Europe, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Asia, and Africa.

Stellios Arseniyadis did his PhD under the guidance of Dr Charles Mioskowski at the University of Strasbourg (France). In 2001, he joined Rhodia Chirex Inc. in Boston (USA) where he worked on various palladium- and copper-catalyzed aryl bond forming processes in collaboration with Pr Stephen L. Buchwald from MIT. After a first postdoc with Pr. Alan C. Spivey at Imperial College London (UK) working in the field of asymmetric organocatalysis, he joined Pr. K. C. Nicolaou's group at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla (USA) where he was involved in the synthesis of new epothilone B analogues and on the total synthesis of vannusal A. In 2005, he was appointed a permanent CNRS researcher position back in France and was promoted to Director in 2015. The same year, he accepted a Reader position at Queen Mary University of London (UK). His group is mainly interested in developing new synthetic tools and applying them to the synthesis of biologically active frameworks - https://arseniyadislab.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk

Jan van Maarseveen obtained obtained his Ph.D. in 1994 at the University of Nijmegen on the total synthesis of indole alkaloids. From 1994-1999 he joined Solvay-Pharmaceuticals (Weesp, The Netherlands) as a farmacochemist involved in combinatorial druglike molecule library synthesis and as a group leader in a traditional lead optimization program. In november 1999 he moved back to academia as an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam. Meanwhile, he rose through the ranks and was promoted in 2015 to full professor. His research focusses on the development of methodology to enable the synthesis of small and strained cyclic peptides together with the development of enantioselective catalytic methods with applications in alkaloid synthesis. Currently, the group shifts the research towards covalent scaffold-based methodology development to synthetically disclose the natural lasso peptide series and other mechanically interlocked molecules. Jan is an enthousiastic teacher and obtained several prices of which the “best teacher of the year of the University of Amsterdam in 2012” award is the most prestiguous one. In 2016 he was awarded the Royal Dutch Chemical Society Van Marum Medal for his contributions to chemistry outreach and excellence in teaching.

Aline Carrel obtained her bachelor and master degrees in chemistry and molecular sciences from the University of Bern. She performed her master’s thesis in the group of Prof. Jean-Louis Reymond on expanding the chemical space using synthetic organic chemistry. During her studies, she did two internships at Novartis and CSL Behring and gained insights into industry. In 2019 she started her PhD at the University of Bern in the group of Prof. Jean-Louis Reymond, focusing on the synthesis of novel 3D building blocks obtained from the generated database (GDB) project and their application to medicinal chemistry.

Tim Jonckers obtained his Ph. D in Organic chemistry from the University of Antwerp, Belgium in 2002. Currently, he is Scientific Director, Discovery Chemistry at Janssen Pharmaceutica, Beerse Belgium. His main activities are directed towards finding novel small molecule inhibitors useful for the treatment of various infectious diseases. His scientific work has culminated in co-inventorship on 51 patent applications and co-authorship on 31 publications in peer reviewed journals. During his free time, he likes spending time with his family, playing tennis, and riding his bicycle.

María-Jesús Pérez-Pérez is Research Professor at the Medicinal Chemistry Institute belonging to the Spanish National Research Council (IQM, CSIC) in Madrid (Spain). She got her PhD in Pharmacy and then moved to Rega Institute (KULeuven) as a postdoc for more than 2 years. In 1995 she got a position as tenured scientist at IQM, CSIC where she has been Head of Department and Director of the Institute. Her research is mostly devoted to antiviral and antitumor chemotherapy from a medicinal chemistry perspective. She has been working in selective inhibitors against therapeutically-relevant nucleoside processing enzymes as well as in the identification and optimization of antivirals against HIV, enterovirus or alphavirus. One of her current projects involves heterocyclic compounds interfering with the capping process in alphavirus. She is also coordinator of the Spanish network for antivirals against arboviral diseases (Rearbovir).

Dr Andrade obtained her Ph.D in Drugs and Medicines from the University of Sao Paulo in 2009. Currently, she is Associate Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the Federal University of Goiás, Brazil. Her research group, LabMol, focuses on Computer-Assisted and Artificial Intelligence-oriented Drug Discovery for Neglected and Emerging diseases. Her research also focuses on the development of AI tools for prediction of toxicity properties of chemicals. She has published more than 96 articles in indexed scientific journals and 4 book chapters, with an H-factor equal to 18. She has two patents issued in Brazil for the discovery of new active compounds against neglected diseases. She has oriented 9 doctoral theses and 14 master's dissertations. She was awarded with the For Women in Science award from L’Oréal-ABC-UNESCO in Brazil (2014), and with the International Rising Talents award from L’Oréal – UNESCO in France (2015). She has been elected to the Young Academy of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and for the Global Young Academy of Sciences (GYA).

General Dr. Marco L. Lolli is a researcher at the University of Turin (IT) and an internationally recognized Medicinal Chemist specialized in the use of innovative bioisosteric tools inside hit-to-led optimization processes. Position: - Current) Assistant Prof Med Chem (Dept. Science and Drug technology, University of Turin, IT); - from February 2022): Associate Prof Med Chem (University of Turin) Research field: Broad-spectrum antivirals (SARS-CoV-2 and other CoVs), cancer (Leukemia, Breast and Prostatic cancer), neglected diseases (Malaria, Leishmaniasis, ….) and Neurotransmission (Gaba and Glu).

After a series of academic appointment at the University of Bath (UK), Pouton moved to Monash University in 2001 to take up the Chair and Head of Department of Pharmaceutical Biology. Over the past five years he has been Head of Drug Delivery, Disposition and Dynamics (D4) at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, ranked #2 in the world for research in pharmacy and pharmacology. His department is home to over 200 research scientists. Pouton has published >160 full manuscripts including 53 over the past five years. His work has been cited >10000 times, with over 700 citations per annum for the past five years (Scopus data). In 2015, 2016 and 2018 he was identified by Thompson Reuters as a Highly Cited Researcher in the discipline of Pharmacology & Toxicology. Pouton currently supervises a team of 16 PhD students and 4 grant- funded research assistants. He has supervised 67 PhD completions and supervised over 20 postdoctoral research assistants. Pouton contributes to the research fields of nucleic acid delivery, stem cell technology, drug delivery and vaccine design. In relation to COVID-19 research, he has been using his experience in nucleic acid delivery to design and deliver candidate mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. He has a long-standing interest in the use of differentiated pluripotent stem cells for disease modelling, drug discovery and cell therapy, with an emphasis on neurodegenerative diseases.

Dr. Sheng Ding is currently the Dean and Bayer Distinguished Professor in the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Director of Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Tsinghua University. He is also the founding Institute Director of Global Health Drug Discovery Institute in Beijing, a joint venture by Tsinghua University and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Dr. Ding also holds a joint appointment as William K. Bowes, Jr. Distinguished Investigator at the Gladstone Institutes, and Professor at Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, University of California San Francisco. He obtained his B.S. in chemistry with honors from Caltech in 1999, and a Ph.D. in chemistry from The Scripps Research Institute in 2003. Before moving to back to China, Ding was an Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor of Chemistry at Scripps from 2003 to 2011, and then Senior Investigator/Professor at Gladstone/UCSF from 2011 to 2016. Dr. Ding has pioneered on developing and applying innovative chemical approaches to stem cell biology and regeneration, with a focus on discovering and characterizing novel small molecules that can control various cell fate/function, including stem cell maintenance, activation, differentiation and reprogramming in various developmental stages and tissues. Ding has published over 150 research articles, reviews and book chapters, and made several seminal contributions to the stem cell field and drug discovery. Ding is a cofounder of several biotechnology companies.

Angela Russell is Professor of Medicinal Chemistry in the Departments of Chemistry and Pharmacology at the University of Oxford. She gained her MChem degree from the University of Oxford in 2000 and her DPhil in Organic Chemistry in 2004. In 2007 she was awarded a Research Councils’ UK Fellowship in Medicinal Chemistry jointly between the Department of Chemistry and Pharmacology in Oxford. In 2018 she was made Professor of Medicinal Chemistry. Her work lies at the interface of Chemistry, Biology and Medicine and aims to discover new small molecules and mechanisms to manipulate cell fate and translate them into therapeutic agents, particularly for degenerative diseases and cancer.

Dennis Schade is Professor of Pharmaceutical and Medicinal Chemistry at the Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel. He was trained as a pharmacist and medicinal chemist at the CAU Kiel and obtained his Ph.D. in 2009. After postdoctoral stays at the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute and Human BioMolecular Research Institute (San Diego), he became junior group leader at the TU Dortmund University for independent research in the field of small molecule stem cell modulators. In 2016, he moved to the University of Greifswald as assoc. Professor of Pharmaceutical Bioanalytics, before he accepted a call to the University of Kiel in 2018. His current research merges stem cell-based techniques with chemical biology and medicinal chemistry for various applications in drug development.

After a series of academic appointment at the University of Bath (UK), Pouton moved to Monash University in 2001 to take up the Chair and Head of Department of Pharmaceutical Biology. Over the past five years he has been Head of Drug Delivery, Disposition and Dynamics (D4) at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, ranked #2 in the world for research in pharmacy and pharmacology. His department is home to over 200 research scientists. Pouton has published >160 full manuscripts including 53 over the past five years. His work has been cited >10000 times, with over 700 citations per annum for the past five years (Scopus data). In 2015, 2016 and 2018 he was identified by Thompson Reuters as a Highly Cited Researcher in the discipline of Pharmacology & Toxicology. Pouton currently supervises a team of 16 PhD students and 4 grant- funded research assistants. He has supervised 67 PhD completions and supervised over 20 postdoctoral research assistants. Pouton contributes to the research fields of nucleic acid delivery, stem cell technology, drug delivery and vaccine design. In relation to COVID-19 research, he has been using his experience in nucleic acid delivery to design and deliver candidate mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. He has a long-standing interest in the use of differentiated pluripotent stem cells for disease modelling, drug discovery and cell therapy, with an emphasis on neurodegenerative diseases.

Dr Ola Engkvist is head of Molecular AI in Discovery Sciences, AstraZeneca R&D. He did his PhD in computational chemistry at Lund University followed by a postdoc at Cambridge University. After working for two biotech companies he joined AstraZeneca in 2004. He currently lead the Molecular AI department, where the focus is to develop novel methods for ML/AI in drug design , productionalize the methods and apply the methods to AstraZeneca’s small molecules drug discovery portfolio. His main research interests are deep learning based molecular de novo design, synthetic route prediction and large scale molecular property predictions. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed scientific publications. He is adjunct professor in machine learning and AI for drug design at Chalmers University of Technology and a trustee of Cambridge Crystallographic Data Center.

Klavs F. Jensen is Warren K. Lewis Professor in Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2007- July 2015 he was the Head of the Department of Chemical Engineering. He received his MSc in Chemical Engineering from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests include on-demand multistep synthesis, methods for automated synthesis, and machine learning techniques for chemical synthesis and interpreting large chemical data sets. He is a co-director of MIT's Pharma AI consortium that aims to bring machine learning into pharmaceutical discovery and development workflows.

Leroy (Lee) Cronin FRSE was born in the UK in 1973 was appointed to be Regius Professor of Chemistry in Glasgow in 2013 after being a professor (2009 & 2006) and reader in Glasgow since 2002. Between 2000-2002 he was a lecturer at the University of Birmingham. Alexander von Humboldt research fellow (Uni. of Bielefeld); 1997-1999: Research fellow (Uni. of Edinburgh); 1997: Ph.D. Bio-Inorganic Chemistry, Uni. of York; 1994 BSc. Chemistry, First Class, Uni. of York. Prizes include 2019 Japan Society of Coordination Chemistry International Prize, 2018 ACS Inorganic Lectureship, 2018 RSC Interdisciplinary Prize, 2015 RSC Tilden Prize, 2013 BP/RSE Hutton Prize, 2012 RSC Corday Morgan, 2011, Election to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2009. His research has four main aims 1) the construction of an artificial life form / work out how inorganic chemistry transitioned to biology / searching for new life forms; 2) the digitization of chemistry; and 3) the use of artificial intelligence in chemistry including the construction of ‘wet’ chemical computers; 4) The exploration of complexity and information in chemistry. He runs a team of around 60 people funded by grants from the UK EPSRC, US DARPA, Templeton, Google, BAe, JM and is developing both ‘open-source’ as well as commercial chemputers. See www.chemify.org

He received his degree in theoretical chemistry in 2001 (University of Pisa and Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa) and the doctorate in 2006 in computational chemistry at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Italy. From 2006 to 2008, he worked as a post-doctoral researcher in the research group of Prof. Dr. Jürg Hutter at the University of Zurich, where he developed algorithms for ab initio and classical molecular dynamics simulations. In 2008, he joined IBM Research Zurich. Since 2020, he is managing the group of AI for Chemistry and Materials. The focus of his research group is on the application of machine learning/artificial intelligence technologies to chemistry and materials science problems with the purpose of digitising complex workflows. IBM RXN for chemistry (https://rxn.res.ibm.com) is the platform freely accessible world wide providing access to the large number of machine learning technologies developed by our group for synthetic organic chemistry.

Dr Ola Engkvist is head of Molecular AI in Discovery Sciences, AstraZeneca R&D. He did his PhD in computational chemistry at Lund University followed by a postdoc at Cambridge University. After working for two biotech companies he joined AstraZeneca in 2004. He currently lead the Molecular AI department, where the focus is to develop novel methods for ML/AI in drug design , productionalize the methods and apply the methods to AstraZeneca’s small molecules drug discovery portfolio. His main research interests are deep learning based molecular de novo design, synthetic route prediction and large scale molecular property predictions. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed scientific publications. He is adjunct professor in machine learning and AI for drug design at Chalmers University of Technology and a trustee of Cambridge Crystallographic Data Center.

Werngard Czechtizky is Head of Medicinal Chemistry for Respiratory, Inflammation and Autoimmunity (RIA) at AstraZeneca in Gothenburg, Sweden. She has a track record of delivery of clinical candidates and lead compounds across several therapeutic areas (CV, Diabetes, Pain, CNS, Inflammation and Respiratory). Werngard has continuously implemented state of the art technologies into Medicinal Chemistry. These include e.g. efficient integration of machine learning methods into drug discovery projects, setup of New Modalities Medicinal Chemistry capabilities, implementation of automated synthesis, purification and analytics facilities and efficient integration of compound synthesis with physchem & eADME profiling to accelerate DMTA cycles. Werngard is part of AZ’s Global Chemistry Council, serves on scientific advisory boards of journals and conferences, and is co-/author of ca 80 publications and patents. She has studied at the Technical University of Graz, Austria, received a PhD from ETH Zürich and a postdoctoral training at Harvard University. Before joining AZ in 2017, she has been Head of Chemistry at Sanofi Frankfurt, Germany.

Montse Erra is the Head of Medicinal Chemistry at Almirall, Barcelona, Spain. In 1999 she started her career in the pharmaceutical industry by joining the Medicinal Chemistry department at Tibotec (Belgium) as junior research scientist working in the field of HIV protease inhibitors. In 2002 she joined Almirall, where she has played a key role in the design and identification of several clinical candidates and their back-ups in different therapeutic areas such as autoimmune diseases, respiratory and dermatology. In 2011 she was nominated as Chemistry Program Leader, since then she has been directing the research activity of three different programs which also culminated in the identification of 3 development candidates and 3 back-up molecules. She is the co-author/inventor of 26 articles, posters and patents. Montse has 20 years’ experience in pharmaceutical discovery and holds a broad knowledge in small molecule based therapeutics by different administration routes (oral, inhaled and topical).

Dr Duncan E Shaw is an Associate Director in Medicinal chemistry at Novartis, and has worked in support of the respiratory drug discovery group since 2005. He was previously a research fellow at Merck Research Laboratories. He obtained a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Nottingham UK (1993) and carried out post-doctoral research at the Universität Stuttgart and the University of Leeds. Duncan’s research interests include the design of small molecules for pulmonary delivery and he has lead several inhaled research projects at Novartis. The delivery of clinical candidates from these projects has allowed him to explore further the ideal properties for an inhaled drug.

Kevin Dack has been continuously learning about Medicinal Chemistry for 39 years, since graduating in 1982 from Southampton University, UK. The first 29 years of his career were based at Pfizer Research in Sandwich, UK, where he progressed from a lab-based synthetic chemist role to become Associate Research Fellow leading numerous Projects across multiple Therapeutic Areas. In 2011, Kevin moved to Denmark to join LEO Pharma in Copenhagen. Here the focus for the last 10 years, has been on oral and topical therapeutics in Dermatology, where he is Research Fellow in Drug Design at LEO Pharma. His current main interests include Protein-Protein Interaction Modulators (PPIm) and new modalities, such as Targeted Protein Degradation and modulating RNA pathways using Small Molecule.

Thomas Fuchss is Director in Global Medicinal Chemistry at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. Thomas received his diploma in Chemistry and doctorate with honors from Universität Konstanz, Germany. After holding various positions of increasing responsibility in Medicinal Chemistry at ALTANA as well as its Research Institute in Waltham, MA, USA, where he worked on inflammation, respiration and oncology, Thomas joined Merck, initially in the field of metabolic disorders and osteoarthritis, before becoming involved mainly in oncology. He has a track record of delivering lead compounds and clinical candidates, among them the kinase inhibitor Peposertib as well as Ataxia-Telangiectasia Mutated kinase inhibitors in clinical development. Thomas has a passion for project leadership that has led him to Program Lead level within early development. Moreover, Thomas leads the Research Pharmaceutics Processing Group, which applies state-of-the-art synthesis technologies within Discovery & Development Technologies as part of Merck Biopharma’s global research. He is the author of more than 50 publications and patent applications.

Simona Cotesta received her PhD from the Biochemistry Institute of ETH Zurich in 2002, studying protein flexibility through molecular dynamic simulations. From 2002 to 2005 she was part of the molecular modelling groups of GSK (Verona, IT), Pharmacia (Nerviano,IT) and Roche (Basel, CH) as post-doctoral fellow. In 2005, she joined the Computer Aided Drug Discovery (CADD) team in Novartis (Basel) and became group leader in 2017. Since 2015 she is chemistry project team leader in the Oncology field.

Niall received his masters degree in medicinal chemistry from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland and subsequently joined GlaxoSmithKline’s Discovery Chemistry group in Stevenage, England in 2006. From there, Niall gained experience across multiple phases of drug discovery throughout GSK from hit identification to late stage lead optimisation and targetted protein degradation. In 2014 Niall gained his PhD in a collaborative programme between GSK and the University of Strathclyde on a project entitled “The design, synthesis and optimisation αvβ6 antagonists as potential idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis agents”, a project that led to the identification of clinical candidate GSK3008348A. Niall is a named inventor on 11 patent applications and has authored 11 scientific publications.

Dr. Nir London completed his PhD in computational structural biology at the Hebrew University in 2012. He then pursued a post-doctoral fellowship with Brian Shoichet at UCSF where he developed a pioneering virtual screening platform for covalent inhibitor discovery. In 2015 Dr. London joined the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he is currently the Alan and Laraine Fischer Career Development Chair in the Dept. of Chemical and Structural Biology. Dr. London’s lab is focused on covalent chemical biology and drug discovery and is developing new technologies to discover and functionalize covalently acting compounds. His honors include amongst others the Chorev award by the Israel Chemical Society, the Alon fellowship, and a BCRF-AACR Career Development Award.

Dr. Rademacher earned his BSc in Molecular Biotechnology and MSc in Molecular Life Science at the University of Lübeck. In 2009, he received his doctorate from the same University, where he worked on virus/carbohydrate interactions using NMR spectroscopy under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Thomas Peters (Department of Chemistry). He then underwent postdoctoral training with Prof. Dr. James C. Paulson at The Scripps Research Institute (USA) in the Department of Chemical Physiology, where he entered the field of glycoimmunology. Since December 2011, Dr. Rademacher is appointed at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in the Department of Biomolecular Systems, where he became Emmy-Noether Research Group Leader in June 2012. Since 2017, Dr. Rademacher holds an ERC Starting Grant. His research is focused on the development and application of novel molecular probes to understand the role of carbohydrates in immune cell regulation.

Ulf Nilsson obtained his PhD at Lund University 1995 working with oligosaccharide synthesis under the supervision of professor Göran Magnusson. He did post-doctoral studies 1995-1997 at University of Alberta, Canada, with professor Ole Hindsgaul developing methods for combinatorial carbohydrate chemistry. He initiated his independent research career at Lund University 1998 as an assistant professor and was promoted full professor in 2009. Research interests are on molecular recognition studies in biological systems and in artificial model systems, biology and medicinal chemistry of galectins, sialic acid transport proteins, and DHODH enzymes, and chemistry at brain-machine interfaces. http://www.chem.lu.se/People/NilssonResearchGroup/

Dr. Imberty is the Head of the Centre de Recherches sur les Macromolécules Végétales (CERMAV), a CNRS laboratory affiliated with University Grenoble Alpes. CERMAV is a research center of 100 persons devoted to Glycosciences. Her research interests are in the field of structural glycosciences, with main focus on protein receptors for complex carbohydrates. In particular, structural studies of lectins from pathogenic organisms opened strategies to design glyco-derived compounds with anti-infectious properties. She graduated in biology from Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. In 1984, she joined the CNRS in Grenoble and did her PhD on starch structure. She started modeling studies of protein-carbohydrate interaction during her post-doc in Toronto. Since 1999 she has a senior research position in CNRS-Grenoble.

After completing degrees in Chemistry and Biological Sciences, Dr. Rachel Hevey pursued her PhD under Prof. Chang-Chun Ling at the University of Calgary (Canada) focused on glycoconjugate vaccines and bacterial toxin ligands. In 2013, she joined the group of Prof. Beat Ernst at the University of Basel (Switzerland) as a postdoctoral researcher, leading a new project to help elucidate the role of siglecs in diabetes and also contributing to the ongoing glycomimetic antagonist projects. In 2015 she was promoted to her current position as a Research Associate, and since 2017 has been working with Prof. Daniel Ricklin on the recognition and therapeutic modulation of glycan interactions in the complement immune pathway. Dr. Hevey also leads independently funded projects (>1.3M CHF) on glycan-mediated attenuation of pathogen virulence and the development of therapeutic glycopolymers to facilitate blood group-incompatible transplantation.

Dr Andreas Bender is a Director for Digitial Life Sciences at Nuvisan in Berlin, as well as a Reader for Molecular Informatics with the Centre for Molecular Science Informatics at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Cambridge. In his work, Andreas is involved with the integration and analysis of chemical and biological data from different sources, such as structural and bioactivity data, gene expression readouts, cellular imaging data, pathway information, etc. The computational analysis of this information is in his research then aimed at understanding phenotypic compound action – such as cellular readouts and organism-level effects – on a mechanistic level, predicting molecular properties related to both compound effiacy and toxicity, as well as e.g. compound repurposing. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and worked in the Lead Discovery Informatics group at Novartis in Cambridge/MA as well as at Leiden University in the Netherlands and at AstraZeneca before his current post.

Dr. Nadine Schneider obtained a BSc and MSc in Bioinformatics from the Saarland University in Germany. She did her PhD in Molecular Modeling in the group of Prof. Dr. Matthias Rarey at the University of Hamburg, Germany. In her PhD she worked on a novel protein-ligand scoring function which was integrated in the commercial modeling software SeeSAR (BioSolveIT GmbH). In 2014 she joined the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR) in Basel for a postdoc focusing on Cheminformatics and Data Science under supervision of Dr. Gregory Landrum and Dr. Nikolaus Stiefl. Since 2017 she is an investigator in the Computer-Aided Drug Design team in Global Discovery Chemistry in the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, Basel.

Dr Gerhard Hessler is head of the group “Synthetic Molecular Design” in Integrated Drug Discover at Sanofi in Frankfurt, Germany. He is responsible for computational chemistry and data management, structural biology and a medicinal chemistry team. The team wirks in identification of novel lead structures and subsequent lead optimization. Before, he headed teams in computer-aided drug design and structural biology since 2008. He joined Aventis in 2001 as a computational chemist, after working for four years in the computational chemistry group of the Central Research at Bayer AG. Dr Gerhard Hessler did his Ph.D. at Technical University of Munich in NMR-based conformational analysis of biologically active peptides and oligonucleotides. During his industrial career the main focus of his work is the application of ligand- and structure-based design techniques to the development of drugs.

After gaining a degree in Natural Sciences (Biochemistry) at the University of Cambridge and a PhD in Microbial Physiology at the University of Leicester, Mike entered the pharmaceutical industry with Glaxo in 1981. After 20 years in natural product research with Glaxo and subsequently GlaxoWellcome and GSK, Mike moved into the biotech sector as a co-founder of Novacta Biosystems, a company developing new antibiotics for poorly served infections. As CSO he led the Company’s C. difficile programme, taking the novel lantibiotic derivative, NVB302, into clinical evaluation. Subsequently as CEO of Cantab Anti-infectives, Mike led the Company’s next generation polymyxin programme until its acquisition by Spero Therapeutics. Mike is now an independent consultant as well as Head of Biology at Oxford Drug Design. He has authored over 60 papers and is an inventor on over 20 patents.

Dr. Patrizio Mattei is an Expert Scientist, Medicinal Chemistry at the Roche Innovation Center Basel, Pharma Research & Early Development (pRED). His research interests have been mainly devoted to the areas of vascular and metabolic diseases, ophthalmology, and more recently antibiotics, contributing to 6 molecules in human clinical trials (e. g., carmegliptin, a DPP-IV inhibitor for the treatment of diabetes). He is a co-inventor in more than 60 patent applications and has co-authored 18 peer-reviewed articles in the field of drug discovery. Before joining Roche in 1999, he earned a Doctor of Sciences degree from the ETH Zürich and was a postdoctoral research fellow at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

Prof. Dr. Anna K. H. Hirsch obtained her M. Sci. from the University of Cambridge and received her Ph.D. from the ETH Zurich in 2008 under Prof. F. Diederich. Subsequently, she joined the group of Prof. J.-M. Lehn at the Institut de Science et d’Ingénierie Supramoléculaires (ISIS) in Strasbourg as an HFSP postdoctoral fellow, before taking up a position as assistant professor at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry at the University of Groningen in 2010 where she was promoted to associate professor in 2015. In 2017, she became head of the department “Drug Design and Optimization” at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS) and full professor at Saarland University. Her work focuses on target-based anti-infective drug discovery, recognised by numerous prizes such as the Innovation Prize for Medicinal Chemistry of the GdCh/DPhG.

Carsten Peukert obtained a Bachelor and Master’s degree in ‘Life Science’ at the University of Konstanz (2012-2017). His Master thesis, in the group ‘Biological Chemistry’ of Dr. T. Böttcher at the University of Konstanz, focused on a new method to profile, detect and immobilize, bioactive small molecules from complex extracts at their target, called ‘Proteomic Metabolite Profiling’. At the end of 2017, he joined the ‘Chemical Biology’ department of Prof. Dr. M. Brönstrup at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) for his PhD thesis. Herein, he works on the design, synthesis and biological evaluation of antimicrobial siderophore-conjugates and innovative, chemiluminescent siderophore imaging probes. Carsten is thankful for the support by a two year ‘Kekulé scholarship’ from the ‘Fonds der chemischen Industrie (FCI)’.

Dr. Jennifer Petter is the Founder and CSO of Arrakis Therapeutics. Previously she was Vice President of Chemistry at Celgene, Vice President of Drug Discovery at Avila Therapeutics, Vice President of Research at Mersana Therapeutics, Director of Small Molecule Drug Discovery at Biogen, Section Head in Oncology Chemistry at Sandoz/Novartis, and Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Petter graduated from Dartmouth College with an AB in chemistry, earned her PhD in organic chemistry at Duke University with Ned Porter, and was a post-doctoral fellow in Ron Breslow’s group at Columbia University. She has ushered multiple compounds into clinic trials for the treatment of cancer, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, and sepsis.

David Hardick is a Director of Medicinal Chemistry at Storm Therapeutics, Cambridge UK. He joined Storm in 2017 and led the METTL3 medicinal chemistry program through the LO phase to candidate nomination of STC-15 in 2020. He is currently involved with preclinical development activities of STC-15 with the aim to enter the clinic with this compound in early 2022. David completed his Ph.D. (organic chemistry) in 1992 at the University of Warwick, UK and then took up a Wellcome Trust Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the School of Pharmacy and Pharmacology, Bath University, UK. Since 1996, he has worked for various drug discovery and development companies as a medicinal chemistry leader and produced several preclinical candidates during this time for CNS, inflammation and oncology therapy areas.

Amanda E. Hargrove, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at Duke University. Prof. Hargrove earned her Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin (2010) followed by an NIH postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. Since 2013, Prof. Hargrove’s laboratory at Duke has focused on developing small molecule probes to investigate the structure and function of RNA molecules relevant to human disease. The lab works to understand the fundamental drivers of selective small molecule:RNA recognition and to use this knowledge to functionally modulate viral and oncogenic RNA structures. Congruent with the interdisciplinary nature of this program, Prof. Hargrove holds a secondary appointment in the Biochemistry Department and membership in the Duke Cancer Institute, the Pharmaceutical Sciences Training Program, and the Center for Biological and Tissue Engineering. In December 2019, Prof. Hargrove was appointed Editor-in-Chief of Medicinal Research Reviews. More information can be found here: https://chem.duke.edu/labs/hargrove

Emma Campbell is a final year PhD student studying at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland with Professor Glenn Burley. She graduated from the University of Glasgow with a masters in Chemistry with Medicinal Chemistry, during which she spent a year at GSK Ulverston working in process chemistry. In 2017, she completed her final year project focusing on total synthesis of a natural product, Corynesidone A with Dr Joëlle Prunet . She is primarily interested in understanding the subtle interplay between chemistry and biology and how that can be developed to treat disease. Her current research interests include designing small molecules to target RNA, focusing particularly on modulating complex processes such as RNA splicing.

Stefan Laufer is Professor and Chairman for Pharmaceutical/Medicinal Chemistry at Tuebingen University. He received his degrees from Regensburg University. After 10 years in Pharmaceutical Industry he joined in 1999 Tuebingen University as Chairman Pharm./Med. Chemistry. His research interests are anti-inflammatory and cancer drug discovery with various eicosanoid (COX-1,2,3, LOXs, mPGES1, cPLA2) and protein kinase targets (e.g. p38, JAKs, JNKs, CK1d, mtEGRFs, BTK, ATM, AurKa) . Three compounds from his lab entered clinical development phases. Dr. Laufer chairs the ICEPHA (Interfaculty Center for Pharmacogenomics and Drug Research) and TüCADD, Tuebingen Center for Academic Drug Discovery and is co-founder of two start-up companies. As part of this work, a proprietary kinase inhibitor collections is established (TüKIC, 10.000 cpds). He authored more than 500 publications, 15 books/bookchapters and is inventor in 42 patent families with >330 national applications.

Evripidis (Evris) Gavathiotis, Ph.D. is a Professor of Biochemistry and Medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and faculty member of the Albert Einstein Cancer Center, the Institute for Aging Research, and the Wilf Family Cardiovascular Research Institute. He received his Ph.D. in biological chemistry from the University of Nottingham. He performed postdoctoral research at Rockefeller University and at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and he was junior faculty at Harvard Medical School. He started his lab at Einstein in 2011 as assistant professor and he was promoted to full professor in 2019. His research focuses on mechanisms and protein interactions in cell death and cell survival signaling and the discovery and optimization of small molecule modulators towards novel chemical tools and therapeutics. His work has pioneered structural and mechanistic insights of BCL-2 family proteins and other key proteins. He has discovered first-in-class small molecules for several “undruggable” targets and demonstrated novel pharmacological strategies. His laboratory’s research has contributed to the founding of three biotechnology companies (Stelexis Therapeutics, Selphagy Therapeutics, Aspida Therapeutics) that are advancing novel therapeutics for cancer and aging-associated diseases. Dr. Gavathiotis has received numerous awards including an Sidney Kimmel Scholar Award, the 2014 Young Chemical Biologist Award, the 2015 Pershing Square Sohn Prize, an AHA Collaborative Science Award, a Irma T. Hirschl Career Scientist Award, an BioAccelerate NYC Prize and the Julius Marmur Mentorship Award. He has served on numerous NIH study sections and review panels in chemical biology and drug discovery. He is a member of the American Chemical Society, the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the American Association for Cancer Research.

Laia Miret Casals obtained a BSc in Chemistry at the University of Barcelona (UB) in 2008 and a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Fernando Albericio and Prof. Antonio Zorzano at UB in 2014, where she was exploring small molecules for modulating biological targets. After her PhD, she did postdoctoral studies on the development of bicyclic peptide drugs for the treatment of respiratory infectious diseases with Almirall Pharma/UB and on the development of molecular probes to study memory formation at The University of Queensland with A/Prof. Markus Muttenthaler. Then, she moved to Belgium as a postdoctoral assistant at the Department of Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry at Ghent University in Prof. Annemieke Madder’s group, where she is fine-tuning a novel furan-oxidation mediated technology to investigate protein-protein and peptide-protein interactions in vitro as well as on live cells using furan-modified peptides/proteins to develop new covalent drugs.

Dr. Stefanie Flohr, Associate Director and Group leader in Medicinal chemistry at Novartis Institute of Biomedical research (NIBR) is identifying drugs to treat patients suffering from neuromuscular diseases. In her career in industry she worked across many disease areas. Her research interests span a wide range of topics within medicinal chemistry and in particular Fragment and Structure based discovery which she applied across several projects. At NIBR, she has led several teams including the early development team identifying LNP023 a novel FB inhibitor as a suited candidate entering FIH clinical studies. She started her industrial career in 1999 at Aventis, Frankfurt, Germany after a postdoc with Donald Hilvert, ETH, Zürich and a PhD under the supervision of Prof. Herbert Waldmann at KIT, Germany.

Dr. John Macor earned his B.S. degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1982 doing undergraduate research with Professor Marvin Miller, and earned his Ph.D. degree in organic chemistry at Princeton University with Professor E. C. Taylor in 1986. Dr. Macor’s professional career has spanned five different decades and four different pharmaceutical companies with significant contributions at each of them. He began his career at Pfizer (Groton, CT) in 1986, and he moved to Astra Arcus (Rochester, NY) in 1994. In 1997 he joined Bristol-Myers Squibb (Princeton, NJ), and in 2016, he accepted the role as Global Head of Integrated Drug Discovery for Sanofi with groups in Paris, Frankfurt and Waltham, MA. Dr. Macor is a co-inventor of Relpax® (eletriptan) and Nurtec® (rimegepant), both for the treatment of migraine with different mechanisms of action. Dr. Macor is also a co-inventor of rizegepant (migraine, Ph 2/3), sparsentan (focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, Ph 3) and LX-9211 (neuropathic pain, Ph 1b). A full biography for Dr. Macor can be found at https://www.acsmedchem.org/?nd=Macor.

Sébastien Papot was born at the end of the second millennium and grew up in Niort (France) with his parents and two brothers. His bachelor degree in hands, he went to the University of Poitiers (France) where he studied organic chemistry. He obtained a Ph.D. in 1998 under the supervision of Prof. Jean-Pierre Gesson. The subject of his thesis was the study of glucuronide prodrugs for cancer chemotherapy. Then, he moved successively to the University of Orléans (Prof. G. Guillaumet, France) and the University College Cork (Prof. A. Maguire, Ireland) as a post-doctoral fellow working on several projects in the area of medicinal chemistry. During his stay in Cork, he became very interested in beer, especially Irish beer. In 2003, he moved back to Poitiers to start an academic career as an Assistant Professor. In 2014, he accepted a full professorship in the same university. He is currently the group leader of the “Programmed Molecular Systems” team. His research interests include the design of smart drug delivery systems for cancer chemotherapy, functional interlocked systems and prebiotic chemistry. Prof. Sébastien Papot is also the President of the French Society of Medicinal Chemistry and the cofounder of Seekyo, a privately-owned biotech company developing the next generation of chemotherapies.

Dario Neri was born in Rome on 1 May 1963, but grew up in Siena (Italy). He studied Chemistry at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and earned a PhD in Chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich), under the supervision of Professor Kurt Wüthrich (Nobel Prize Chemistry 2002). After a post-doctoral research internship (1992-1996) at the Medical Research Council Centre in Cambridge (UK), under the supervision of Sir Gregory Winter (Nobel Prize Chemistry 2018), he became professor at ETH Zürich in 1996. Dario Neri is currently Full Professor of Biomacromolecules at the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences, ETH Zürich. The research of the Neri group focuses on the engineering of therapeutic antibodies for the therapy of cancer and other angiogenesis-related disorders and on the development of DNA-encoded chemical libraries. Dario Neri is a co-founder of Philogen (www.philogen.com), a Swiss-Italian biotech company which has brought various antibody products into multicenter clinical trials for the treatment of cancer and of chronic inflammatory conditions. Dario Neri has published ~400 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. He is the recipient of the ISOBM Abbott Prize 2000, of the Amgen-Dompe’ Biotec Award 2000, of the Mangia d’Oro 2001, of the Prous Award 2006 of the European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry, of the Robert-Wenner-Prize 2007 of the Swiss Cancer League, of the SWISS BRIDGE Award 2008, of the Prix Mentzer of the French Medicinal Chemistry Society in 2011, of the Phoenix Prize 2014, of an ERC Advanced Grant in 2015 and of the 6th World ADC Award in 2019.

Dr. Muthiah (Mano) Manoharan serves as the Senior Vice President of Drug Innovation, a Scientific Advisory Board Member, and Distinguished Research Scientist at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. He and his team pioneered the discovery and development of the chemical modifications and delivery platforms (Lipid Nanoparticles and GalNAc Conjugates) that make RNA interference-based human therapeutics possible. This work led to the approval of four RNAi therapeutics: ONPATTRO® (patisiran, 2018), GIVLAARI® (givosiran, 2019), OXLUMO® (lumasiran, 2020) and LEQVIO®* (inclisiran, 2020).

Dr. Manoharan received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in chemistry at the American College, Madurai, India. He earned his Ph.D. in chemistry (with Professor Ernest L. Eliel) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and carried out post-doctoral research (with Professor John A.Gerlt) in the field of oligonucleotide chemistry at Yale University and at the University of Maryland. Dr. Manoharan is the winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Society (2019) and the M. L. Wolfrom Award from the American Chemical Society (2007).

Erem Bilensoy is a full Professor of Pharmaceutical Technology at Hacettepe University Faculty of Pharmacy in Ankara. She has completed her double PhD in Universite Paris-Sud and Hacettepe University in 2002. She served as EUFEPS President between 2015-2019 and is member of FIP Board of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Vice Chair of FIP SIG on Drug Delivery and Manufacturing. Her current research interests include targeted nanoparticles in cancer therapy, cholesterol-targeted nanoparticles to overcome multidrug drug resistance and enhance cellular delivery, applications of proteomics, metabolomics and lipidomics to develop nanomedicines, cationic nanoparticles and their mucosal/oral applications, cyclodextrin-based drug delivery, inkjet and 3D printed drug delivery systems.

Sébastien Papot was born at the end of the second millennium and grew up in Niort (France) with his parents and two brothers. His bachelor degree in hands, he went to the University of Poitiers (France) where he studied organic chemistry. He obtained a Ph.D. in 1998 under the supervision of Prof. Jean-Pierre Gesson. The subject of his thesis was the study of glucuronide prodrugs for cancer chemotherapy. Then, he moved successively to the University of Orléans (Prof. G. Guillaumet, France) and the University College Cork (Prof. A. Maguire, Ireland) as a post-doctoral fellow working on several projects in the area of medicinal chemistry. During his stay in Cork, he became very interested in beer, especially Irish beer. In 2003, he moved back to Poitiers to start an academic career as an Assistant Professor. In 2014, he accepted a full professorship in the same university. He is currently the group leader of the “Programmed Molecular Systems” team. His research interests include the design of smart drug delivery systems for cancer chemotherapy, functional interlocked systems and prebiotic chemistry. Prof. Sébastien Papot is also the President of the French Society of Medicinal Chemistry and the cofounder of Seekyo, a privately-owned biotech company developing the next generation of chemotherapies.

Phil Baran was born in 1977 in Denville, New Jersey. He received his B.S. in chemistry from NYU in 1997, his Ph.D. at The Scripps Research Institute in 2001, and from 2001-2003 he was an NIH-postdoctoral fellow at Harvard. His independent career began at Scripps in the summer of 2003. He currently holds the Darlene Shiley Chair in Chemistry. Phil has published over 180 scientific articles and has been the recipient of several ACS awards such as the Corey (2015), Pure Chemistry (2010), Fresenius (2006), and Nobel Laureate Signature (2003), and several international distinctions such as the Hirata Gold Medal and Mukaiyama Prize (Japan), the RSC award in Synthesis (UK), and the Sackler Prize (Israel). In 2013 he was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, in 2015 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 2016 he was awarded the Blavatnik National Award, and most recently, in 2017, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, USA. He has delivered hundreds of lectures around the world and consults for numerous companies such as Bristol-Myers Squibb (since late 2005), Boehringer-Ingelheim, AstraZeneca, DuPont and TEVA, and is a scientific advisory board member for Eisai, Abide, and AsymChem. In 2016 he was appointed as an Associate Editor for the Journal of the American Chemical Society. He co-founded Sirenas Marine Discovery (2012) and Vividion Therapeutics (2016) and in 2013 he co-authored The Portable Chemist’s Consultant, an interactive book published on the iBooks store along with his graduate class in Heterocyclic Chemistry (viewable for free by anyone on iTunes University). Outside of the lab, Phil enjoys spending time with his wife Ana and three young children (Lucia, Leah, and Manuel).

Prof Stefan Knapp studied Chemistry at the University of Marburg (Germany) and at the University of Illinois. He did his PhD in protein crystallography at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. In 1999, he joined the Pharmacia and left the company in 2004 to set up a group at the Structural Genomics Consortium at Oxford University. From 2008 to 2015 he was a Professor of Structural Biology at Oxford University (UK) and director for Chemical Biology at the Target Discovery Institute. He joined Frankfurt University in 2015 as a Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry. Since 2017 he is the CSO of the SGC node at the Goethe-University Frankfurt. His research interests are the rational design of selective kinase inhibitors and inhibitors of protein interactions modules that function as reader domains of the epigenetic code.

Dr Julie Spicer is a Senior Medicinal Chemist and Associate Director of the Auckland Cancer Society Research Centre (ACSRC) at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her education includes an honours degree (first class) and PhD in synthetic organic chemistry with Distinguished Professor Dame Margaret Brimble (University of Auckland), carrying out the synthesis of various natural products. Subsequently she has been employed at the ACSRC, leading several national and international research programmes involving the design and synthesis of new drugs for a variety of therapeutic areas, with a particular emphasis on novel anti-cancer treatments. Currently, her area of research focuses on the use of small molecules to modulate the immune system. These projects involve selectively targeting cytotoxic effector cells in order to provide a precision medicine for the treatment of cancer. The expectation is that this specificity will ameliorate toxicities that afflict current cancer therapies.

Laia Josa-Culleré received her BSc in Chemistry from the University of Barcelona and MPhil in Organic Chemistry from the University of Cambridge. She then pursued a PhD in the group of Prof Mark Moloney at the University of Oxford, developing mimics of natural products with antibacterial properties. She stayed as a postdoctoral researcher working in the group of Prof Angela Russell, where she led a medicinal chemistry team that developed novel small molecules as differentiation agents against acute myeloid leukemia. She is now an MSCA-IF working with Dr Amadeu Llebaria at the Institute for Advanced Chemistry of Catalonia (IQAC-CSIC) in Barcelona. Her research focuses on the development of innovative chemical tools, including light-activable molecules, against cancer stem cells.

Vanesa Nozal García is a last year PhD student in Organic Chemistry at the Biological Research Centre-Margarita Salas (CSIC) in Madrid, Spain. She graduated from Chemistry at Universidad de Valladolid in 2015 after an Erasmus grant in Ghent Universiteit where she studied new antibiotics under the supervision of Prof. Van der Eycken. She received the M.Sc. in Organic Chemistry in 2016 from Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her current field of research is the synthesis and design of new protein kinase inhibitors for neurodegenerative diseases. Vanesa has also experience in organic nanoparticles preparation and protein expression, purification and crystallization. She is also an active science communicator with experience in seminars and workshops for teenagers, currently coordinating a project called “¿Te atreves a descubrir un medicamento?” funded by Fundación General CSIC.

Salvador Guardiola is a senior researcher at Ona Therapeutics, a biotech company specialized in the discovery of biotherapeutics targeting tumor metastasis. His research areas are chemical biology, protein-protein interactions and drug discovery, with a focus on biophysical tools and computational methods. He graduated in Pharmacy at the University of Barcelona and has developed his research career on the public and private sectors. He received his Ph.D. in chemistry with Ernest Giralt at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine and performed a research stay at the University of Washington with David Baker. Prior to that, he did a 1-year placement in drug discovery and medicinal chemistry at GlaxoSmithKline (UK). Currently, he is associate professor of chemical engineering at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.

Elena Gómez studied Chemistry at the University of Barcelona (1993-1997) and got her MSc in Organic Chemistry at the VUB (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, 1998). She obtained her PhD at the University of Barcelona in the field of Pharmaceutical Chemistry (2004) and she spent 2 years as a postdoctoral student at PCB (Parc Científic de Barcelona) dealing with the chemistry of heterocyclic systems and Multicomponent Reactions. She then joined Almirall at the Medicinal Chemistry Department where she was focused on drug design and synthesis of new chemical entities for inflammatory and respiratory diseases. Due to the last Almirall strategic change she has been lately focused on dermatological diseases. This therapeutic focus diversity has given her the chance to gain experience in the design of drugs for different administration routes (inhaled, oral and topical). Elena has played a crucial role in all the programs she has been involved and now, as Senior Scientist, her research is focused on the discovery of novel Targeted Protein Degraders medicines for the treatment of skin diseases.

Bernd Clement was Professor of Pharmaceutical (Medicinal) Chemistry (C4 Chair) and Director of the Pharmaceutical Institute, University of Kiel, Germany and is now a Professor emeritus at the same institute and still active in research and teaching. His main research interests include all aspects of drug metabolism in particular of nitrogen containing functional groups (amidines, guanidines and their N-oxygenated derivatives) focusing on novel metabolic pathways and on prodrugs. His basic research resulted in prodrug principles for amidines further developed in partnership with industry and patent funds. He discovered a new human drug metabolism enzyme, called mARC, capable of transforming several N-oxygenated groups He is a pharmacist and chemist by training and received his Ph.D. and "Habilitation" in Pharmaceutical (Medicinal) Chemistry.

Jarkko Rautio is professor in pharmaceutical chemistry and a vice head at the School of Pharmacy, University of Eastern Finland. He graduated from the University of Kuopio and did his post doc at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. He has also spent two years at GSK, North Carolina, as a visiting scientist. His research focuses on the chemistry-based methods, especially prodrugs, to overcome drug delivery liabilities of problematic drugs. Much of the research is currently focusing on exploiting two of the body’s natural mechanisms for transporting nutrients, the LAT1 and GLUT1 proteins, for targeted drug delivery across the blood-brain barrier and cancer cells that express these transporters.

Jarkko Rautio is professor in pharmaceutical chemistry and a vice head at the School of Pharmacy, University of Eastern Finland. He graduated from the University of Kuopio and did his post doc at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. He has also spent two years at GSK, North Carolina, as a visiting scientist. His research focuses on the chemistry-based methods, especially prodrugs, to overcome drug delivery liabilities of problematic drugs. Much of the research is currently focusing on exploiting two of the body’s natural mechanisms for transporting nutrients, the LAT1 and GLUT1 proteins, for targeted drug delivery across the blood-brain barrier and cancer cells that express these transporters.

Bernd Clement was Professor of Pharmaceutical (Medicinal) Chemistry (C4 Chair) and Director of the Pharmaceutical Institute, University of Kiel, Germany and is now a Professor emeritus at the same institute and still active in research and teaching. His main research interests include all aspects of drug metabolism in particular of nitrogen containing functional groups (amidines, guanidines and their N-oxygenated derivatives) focusing on novel metabolic pathways and on prodrugs. His basic research resulted in prodrug principles for amidines further developed in partnership with industry and patent funds. He discovered a new human drug metabolism enzyme, called mARC, capable of transforming several N-oxygenated groups He is a pharmacist and chemist by training and received his Ph.D. and "Habilitation" in Pharmaceutical (Medicinal) Chemistry.

Daniel Meibom received his PhD degree in Organic Chemistry under the supervision of Professor Ekkehard Winterfeldt at the University of Hannover. In 2001 he joined Bayer working on combinatorial chemistry, then quickly moved on to medicinal chemistry projects in therapeutic areas like CNS and antibacterials. From 2007-2013 he was responsible for the chemical optimization of several medicinal chemistry projects in the cardiovascular field. Since 2014 he is heading cardiovascular lead optimization projects as a senior scientist. Besides drug design, his is interested in IT tools for medicinal chemists und laboratory safety.

Kristiina M. Huttunen has graduated as a medicinal chemist (M.Sc.) from the University of Kuopio in Finland, from which she also received her Ph.D. in 2009 with a thesis that covered several different prodrug approaches. After her postdoctoral research period at the Auckland Cancer Society Research Centre in New Zealand in 2009-2011, she returned back to Finland to the University of Eastern Finland to build up her own group called “Transporter-mediated Targeted Drug Delivery” group as an Adjunct Professor appointed in 2014. Today, she has published 60 peer-reviewed original articles and 10 peer-reviewed review articles with h-index 17. Majority of her recent work as a group leader has been related to L-type amino acid transporter 1 (LAT1) and brain-targeting approaches, but today she is exploring also other transporters and other targeting tissues, such as tumors and endocrine tissues.

Jörg Distler is currently holding a Heisenberg professorship at the Department of Internal Medicine 3 and Institute for Clinical Immunology at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. His clinical focuses are connective tissue diseases and fibrotic diseases. Jörg Distler is heading the outpatient clinic of the Department of Internal Medicine 3. Moreover, he is principal investigators in numerous international clinical trials (investigator-initiated and industry-sponsored). His research focuses on tissue remodeling in inflammatory diseases. He published > 280 Pubmed-listed articles including > 200 original publications including contributions as senior and corresponding author in journals such as Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Communications, Journal of Experimental Medicine, Journal of Clinical Investigation and PNAS. His work has a strong translational focus: Preclinical work from his group provided the scientific basis for several clinical trials in fibrotic diseases such as systemic sclerosis.

Dr Romain Gosmini is Director of Medicinal Chemistry at Galapagos, Romainville, France. In 1991 he did his PhD in organic synthesis under the guidance of Prof. Jean Normant at the University Paris VI. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Geneva with Prof. Peter Kundig. In 1994 he joined Glaxo where he worked as medicinal chemist and led the chemistry of several programs until 2009. Just after he started working at Galapagos as Group Leader. He is Interested in the different phases of DD (HF, H2L, LO until PCC identification) and involved in various projects such as kinases, proteases, GPCRs and phenotypic, new modalities and degraders, DEL Technology, tissue delivery, Photo-probes, chemical biology. He worked in various disease areas such as cardiovascular, metabolic, inflammation, fibrosis, infectious disease, Cystic Fibrosis, osteoarthritis…

By way of introduction about myself: I studied Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, graduating in 2016 after a masters project in total synthesis supervised by Professor Ian Paterson. After this I carried out a PhD as a part of the collaborative PhD scheme run by GSK and the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, co-supervised by Professor Billy Kerr at Strathclyde and John Pritchard at GSK, working on integrin antagonists. After completing my PhD in December 2019 I began work as a full time employee at GSK in January 2020, where I am a senior scientist in the Medicinal Chemistry department, currently seconded to the department of high throughput chemistry.

Dr Adeline Palisse is senior scientist in Medicinal Chemistry department at Galapagos, Mechelen, Belgium. In 2013, after completing her PhD in organic chemistry under the guidance of Prof. Stefan F. Kirsch at the University of Wuppertal, Germany, she joined Galapagos as medicinal chemist before being promoted to senior scientist in 2018. She then started to lead a chemistry team for target-based (GPCR) and phenotypic projects during the phases of Hit to Lead and Lead Optimization toward PreClinical Candidate. She was involved in projects tackling with various disease areas such as fibrosis, inflammation, infectious disease or cystic fibrosis. She is co-author/inventor of 11 articles and patents.

Paola Castaldi is an experienced and passionate chemical biologist with experience in leading multidisciplinary teams supporting programs across several therapeutic areas and stages. Her drive towards embedding state-of-the-art technologies to drug discovery and development, resulted in several contributions to target identification, mechanism of action and safety deconvolution of therapeutics.

Before joining LifeMine Therapeutics, Paola headed the Chemical Biology & Proteomics department at AstraZeneca. Over the years Paola was responsible for the build of a state-of-the-art chemical biology and mass spectrometry hub with global impact across all therapeutic areas and platforms. Notably she played a critical role to the establishment of the protein degradation and the multiomics initiatives. Before AstraZeneca, Paola was a key contributor of the Chemical Genetics group at Sanofi Oncology, Cambridge, MA with a focus on phenotypic drug discovery projects for the Wnt and KRAS oncogenic pathways.

Between other responsibilities, Paola is part of the SAB for the Chemical Biology Doctorate Program at Imperial College London and has authored more than 25 peer-reviewed articles. In 2017 Paola co-founded the “Chemical Biology in the Hub” symposia which today is the most attended annual chemical biology symposium in the Boston area she co-chaired the 2018-2019 Bioorganic Chemistry Gordon Research Conference.

Paola completed her undergraduate studies in pharmaceutical chemistry and received her Laurea (MSc) at University of Padova, Italy. She then went on to conduct graduate research studies at Imperial College London, UK and postdoctoral studies at UCSD and Boston University.

After her PhD at the University of Padua (Italy), Paola Picotti joined as a postdoc the group of Ruedi Aebersold at ETH Zurich, where she developed targeted proteomic technologies based on mass spectrometry. In 2011, she was appointed Assistant Professor at the Institute of Biochemistry of ETHZ and in 2017 tenured Associate Professor at the Institute of Molecular Systems Biology at ETHZ. Major contributions of the Picotti group include the development of structural proteomics technologies to probe in situ protein structural changes, the characterization of the determinants of proteome thermostability, the large-scale identification of protein small molecule interactions and the discovery of regulators of toxic proteins involved in Parkinson’s disease. Dr. Picotti was awarded the Latsis Prize, the Cotter Award of the US HUPO, the SGMS award, the EMBO Young Investigator Award, the Friedrich Miescher Award, the Juan-Pablo Albar award of the European Proteome Association, an ERC Starting grant, an ERC Consolidator Grant and the EMBO Gold Medal.

Radhia El Phil graduated from the University of Geneva as a federal pharmacist in 2018 after obtaining her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Pharmaceutical Sciences. She is currently pursuing a phD at the university of Geneva at the department of pharmaceutical Chemistry/Biochemistry led by Professor Leonardo Scapozza. Her main focus is the development of a novel in vivo tool for small molecule-target identification, a bacterial three-hybrid system.

Dr Jessica Reynolds I completed my MChem Chemistry degree at St John's College, Oxford in 2016, and subsequently received a place on the Synthesis for Biology and Medicine Centre of Doctoral Training at University College, Oxford. During my DPhil, my research focused on the development of small molecule ligands and PROTACs to probe the function of the TRIM proteins, supervised by Professor Stuart Conway. I then completed a six-month post doc with Stuart working on further PROTAC development for proteins that play a key role in epigenetic regulation. I am currently working as a Medicinal Chemist for Vertex Pharmaceuticals in Oxford, UK.

Donald Hilvert obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1983 from Columbia University. Following postdoctoral work at Rockefeller University, he joined the faculty of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California in 1986 as an Assistant Professor. He was subsequently promoted to associate Professor in 1989 and full Professor in 1994. In 1995, he was named the Janet and W. Keith Kellogg II Professor of Chemistry and an affiliate of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at Scripps. Since October 1997, he has been Professor in the Laboratory of Organic Chemistry at the ETH Zurich (Zurich, Switzerland). Professor Hilvert’s research program focuses on understanding how enzymes work and evolve and on mimicking the properties of these remarkable catalysts in the laboratory. These efforts have been recognized by a number of awards, including the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society, the Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry, the Protein Society Emil Thomas Kaiser Award, and the Ronald Breslow Award for Achievement in Biomimetic Chemistry. He received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Marko D. Mihovilovic graduated in technical chemistry at TU Wien in 1993, also receiving his doctorate from the same university in 1996, in the field of organic synthetic chemistry. Post-doc placements as an Erwin Schrödinger fellow then followed at the University of New Brunswick (Canada) and the University of Florida (USA), in the fields of biocatalysis and molecular biology. Returning to the Institute of Applied Synthetic Chemistry (IAS) at TU Wien, he set up his own research group in 1999. He completed his habilitation in 2003 in bio-organic chemistry and was appointed Associate Professor in 2004. In 2014 he became Full Professor and Chair in Bioorganic Synthetic Chemistry at IAS. Marko Mihovilovic has been Head of the Institute of Applied Synthetic Chemistry with some 120 researchers and staff from 2013-2019 and was appointed as Dean of the Faculty for Technical Chemistry at TU Wien in 2020.

Rebecca Buller is Professor for Chemical and Biotechnological Methods, Systems and Processes at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) and leads the Swiss Competence Center for Biocatalysis (CCBIO). Prior to joining the ZHAW in 2015, she developed several industrial biocatalytic processes in her function as laboratory head and project manager at Firmenich SA, a flavor and fragrance company. Rebecca studied chemistry at the Westfälische Wilhems-Universität Münster and at UC Santa Barbara and holds a PhD degree from the Institute of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences at ETH Zurich. Her research interests include the expansion of the biocatalytic toolbox by sourcing and engineering enzymes for synthetic applications.

Frank is currently heading Business Development and Global Collaboration at Hypha Discovery. The role combines his academic background in science and business, holding degrees in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Westminster, a Master in international commerce from Korea University and an MBA from the Hamburg School of Business Administration. Franks scientific interest is on drug metabolism and the use of enzymes in drug development. He has delivered talks on these topics at various scientific events including conferences by the American Chemical Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Daniel Rauh studied pharmacy at the University of Greifswald and completed his Ph.D. 2003 with Gerhard Klebe in Marburg. After postdoctoral stays with Milton Stubbs in Halle and Kevan Shokat in San Francisco, he became a junior group leader at the Chemical Genomics Centre of the Max Planck Society in Dortmund. Since 2013 he has been a full Professor and Chair of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry. He is active in the field of chemical oncology, targeting acquired drug resistance. At TU Dortmund University, he heads a research group of 30 scientists and staff whose focus is on early drug discovery. Daniel is the founder and coordinator of the Zentrum für integrierte Wirkstoffforschung (ZIW) and the Drug Discovery Hub Dortmund (DDHD) both at TU Dortmund University to translate basic academic research into pharmaceutical application. He also serves as an associate editor for ACS Chemical Biology.

Dr. Markus Klein is a Principal Scientist in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at Merck Healthcare KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. He studied chemistry and theology at Philipps University, Marburg and Heriott Watt University, Edinburgh, and received his PhD in Organic Chemistry under the supervision of Professor Gernot Boche. Prior to moving into drug discovery in 2005, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in liquid crystal research at Merck KGaA. He is involved in teaching pharmacy students in Organic Chemistry. Over the past years his research has focused on the identification and development of small molecules on various target classes in oncology. In the immunoproteasome inhibitor project, he was leading the design and optimization of M3258 which entered clinical studies in 2019.

Tracey Pirali is professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Piemonte Orientale. After the degree in pharmacy in 2004, she gained her PhD in the laboratory of Prof. Tron. She joined the group of prof. Zhu (Paris, CNRS) and of prof. Greaney (Edinburgh, School of Chemistry) as visiting scientist. In 2013 she started her own group: her laboratory is active in the field of drug discovery and in the translation of academic research into pharmaceutical application. She has recently co-founded ChemICare, a spin-off company committed to the development of calcium channel modulators for the treatment of rare genetic diseases. In 2012 she was awarded the Farmindustria Prize by the Italian Chemical Society. She is a member of the Scientific Committee of the European School of Medicinal Chemistry (ESMEC) and local coordinator of the EMJMD EMOTION.

Tanya T. Kelley Current Position Graduate Research Assistant in The Department of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. Research Field Medicinal Chemistry, Computational Medicinal Chemistry and Cancer Biology Education Ph.D., Expected Aug 25th 2021, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine B.S. Chemistry, Florida Atlantic University, 2012 Professional Experience Graduate Research Assistant, The Department of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. PhD Advisors Prof. Stephan C. Schürer and Prof. Anthony J. Capobianco (2015-2021)

Daniel Rauh studied pharmacy at the University of Greifswald and completed his Ph.D. 2003 with Gerhard Klebe in Marburg. After postdoctoral stays with Milton Stubbs in Halle and Kevan Shokat in San Francisco, he became a junior group leader at the Chemical Genomics Centre of the Max Planck Society in Dortmund. Since 2013 he has been a full Professor and Chair of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry. He is active in the field of chemical oncology, targeting acquired drug resistance. At TU Dortmund University, he heads a research group of 30 scientists and staff whose focus is on early drug discovery. Daniel is the founder and coordinator of the Zentrum für integrierte Wirkstoffforschung (ZIW) and the Drug Discovery Hub Dortmund (DDHD) both at TU Dortmund University to translate basic academic research into pharmaceutical application. He also serves as an associate editor for ACS Chemical Biology.

Stephan A. Sieber studied chemistry at the universities of Marburg, Germany and Birmingham, England. He did his graduate studies in the labs of Prof. Marahiel, University of Marburg and Prof. Christopher T. Walsh at Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA. Soon after his graduation he joined the group of Prof. Benjamin F. Cravatt for his postdoctoral work. In 2006 he started his independent research career at the University of Munich (LMU), Germany, funded by a DFG Emmy-Noether grant. In 2009 he was appointed full professor at Technische Universität Munich and received an ERC starting as well as consolidator grant. His research focus is in the field of chemical biology and chemical proteomics with emphasis on the reactivity of natural products and their dedicated targets in prokaryotic as well as eukaryotic cells. Major achievements include the investigation of new treatment options for bacterial infections. These studies are of major importance since the evolution of multidrug resistant bacterial pathogens poses a serious threat to public health.