Traditional drug discovery pipelines have focused on inhibiting protein action to rebalance a disease state. This focus on protein inhibition has limited drug discovery potentially based on the ability of proteins to be targeted and which sites can lead to activity inhibition.
PROteolysis TArgeting Chimera (PROTACs) offer a new avenue for targeting disease states and expanding what diseases are druggable. PROTACs take advantage of the natural machinery of the cell to degrade proteins instead of simply inhibiting their activity. Researchers are using PROTACs to look beyond the active sites of proteins and expand their toolkit for drugging diseases.
Join CDD and our panel of experts as we take a look at the promise of PROTACs just as the first PROTACs are going through clinical trials!
Dr. Fisher is the Chief Scientific Officer at C4 Therapeutics, a new biotechnology company focused on the selective recruitment of targets to E3 ligases for ubiquitination and degradation where he is responsible for strategic delivery of the project portfolio and collaboration management. Prior to joining C4, Dr. Fisher was the Director of Enzymology and Quantitative Biochemistry in the Center for the Development of Therapeutics at the Broad Institute. Before that, he spent 15 years at AstraZeneca in the Infectious Diseases Innovative Medicines Unit, where he led numerous antibacterial programs that progressed through Phase I clinical trials and was the Executive Director, Biological Sciences. Dr. Fisher received his B.A. in Chemistry at the University of Vermont and Ph.D. in Chemistry at Caltech and was a National Institutes of Health Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Fischer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He co-directs the DFCI Center for Protein Degradation. His research focuses on understanding the complex mechanisms that underlie function and regulation of multi-component ubiquitin ligases and their role in disease. His lab pursues novel avenues of therapeutic intervention based on targeting components of the ubiquitin proteasome system, such as methods of targeted protein degradation. Dr. Fischer has been recognized for his pioneering work on the structure of cereblon, the mechanism of action of thalidomide, and his contributions to targeted protein degradation.
Dr. Gray is the Nancy-Lurie Marks Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. Nathanael leads the Dana Farber Program in Chemical Biology and manages a research laboratory. Previously, Nathanael was the Director of Biological Chemistry at the Novartis Institute for Genomics (GNF) in San Diego where he supervised a group of over fifty researchers integrating chemical, biological and pharmacological approaches towards the development of new experimental drugs including ceritinib, siponimod and ABL001. Dr. Gray received his PhD in organic chemistry from Professor Peter Schultz at the University of California at Berkeley in 1999 after receiving his BS degree with the highest honor award from the same institution in 1995