Nicola Burgess-Brown
Thursday, March 20th 2025, at 13:00, CET
Target 2035: The Goal to Develop a Pharmacological Modulator for Every Human Protein
After graduating from university, Nicola moved to SmithKline Beecham where she worked for 1 year before pursuing a PhD in Molecular Microbiology at Nottingham, also sponsored by SB. She then moved to Oxford GlycoSciences, in a team that aimed to identify and validate novel oncology targets for generating therapeutic antibodies. Nicola returned to academia to the University of Oxford to lead a team in Biotechnology within the Structural Genomics Consortium. Over the course of 17 years, working in a highly collaborative environment, her team developed cutting edge technologies and high-throughput (HTP) platforms to express a plethora of very challenging human proteins for structural and functional analyses. From September 2021, she led the Enzymology and Protein Engineering Team at Exact Sciences Innovation in Oxford, producing proteins for cancer diagnostic research. Since January 2024, she has rejoined the SGC, working as a consultant (Chief Operating Officer, Protein Sciences) coordinating protein production across the 6 SGC sites, in addition to building a membrane protein lab as a visiting scientist at UCL in London.
Webinar Summary: The SGC, a global public-private partnership, aims to uncover novel human biology through structural genomics and chemical biology approaches. Our strategy for Target 2035, is to develop tool molecules for every human protein by creating massive open datasets of high-quality protein-small molecule binding data, using DNA-encoded libraries and affinity selection mass spectrometry as the initial data-generation platforms. This requires large amounts of high-quality proteins generated in house and received through collaboration. Models built from these data will be used to predict new and more drug-like small molecule binders, which will be procured or synthesized, and tested experimentally. In 5 years, the project aims to identify experimentally verified hits for thousands of human proteins and to catalyze the development of open algorithms that can be used to computationally predict hits for thousands more, leading to the generation of tool molecules. These tools can then be used to modulate and understand protein function and reveal novel therapeutic targets for tomorrow’s medicines.
Link to join the webinar: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81331976647?pwd=oyNB0k6QwLH0LQnkNa7jNwmZtvNzcX.1