4th Edelris Symposium on Affinity Selection-Mass Spectrometry in Drug Discovery

Hans-Peter Biemann has originated small molecule discovery programs and applied emerging technologies in Genzyme’s and Sanofi’s Drug Discovery units. Research on preclinical and clinical agents have included collaborations with academic labs and contributed to start-up partnership programs and spin-out companies (e.g., Myokardia, Sionna). Working across various disciplines (protein biochemistry, cell biology, structural biology, biophysics), Hans has implemented phenotypic HTS as well as fragment-based modalities. He also has built high-res Cryo EM capabilities and applied Affinity Selection-Mass Spectrometry. Prior to joining Genzyme in the 1990s, he was a post doc in Daniel Koshland’s U.C. Berkeley group and trained with Raymond Erikson (Harvard Ph.D.). His B.S. was earned at Yale.

Christian Heinis is engaged in the discovery and development of cyclic peptides for therapeutic application. His research group generates liands based on cyclic peptides by synthesizing large libraries of random peptides using combinatorial approaches and by screening them for binding or modulating disease targets. An important goal of his team is the development of cyclic peptides that are membrane permeable and/or orally available. Christian Heinis studied chemistry/biochemistry at the ETH Zurich. After his PhD in the research group of Prof. Dr. Dario Neri at ETH Zurich, he completed two postdocs, the first with Prof. Dr. Kai Johnsson at EPFL in Lausanne and the second one with Sir Gregory Winter at LMB-MRC in Cambridge, UK. In 2008, he started as an assistant professor at EPFL and was promoted to associate professor in 2015. Christian Heinis is co-founder of the companies Bicycle Therapeutics and Orbis Medicines.

Charlotte Hurot is a multi-disciplinary engineer from Ecole Centrale (Lyon, FR) and holds a PhD in physics for lifescience from CEA (Grenoble, FR). After initial experience in biosensors applied to diagnostics and environmental and monitoring, she joined Edelris in 2022 as a research scientist and team leader. She manages AS-MS screening projects and is also involved in enhancing the platform's capability and reliability through experimental and data-driven approaches.

Marcel Lachenmann is a Senior Applications and Laboratory Automation Scientist at Mestrelab Research, where he currently focuses primarily on automation of MS and NMR data analysis. Previously, he studied chemistry at Johns Hopkins University and later focused on structure, dynamics, and thermodynamics of zinc finger peptides, primarily using spectroscopic methods, at Harvard University. More recently, he spent nearly a decade working on practical time domain and frequency domain benchtop NMR applications for QA/QC, research and development, and academia.

Dafydd Owen has twenty-five years of experience as a medicinal chemist in the design and synthesis of drug-like molecules for Pfizer at its Sandwich UK and Cambridge MA research sites. He obtained his first degree at Imperial College in 1994 before moving to the University of Cambridge to gain a Ph.D under the supervision of Professor Steve Ley FRS in 1997. Having won a research fellowship for postdoctoral work, he spent 1998 with Professor Leo Paquette at Ohio State University. During his research career he has delivered over one hundred and twenty five invited lectures and is an author on over eighty research papers and patents. He has made contributions to eight clinical candidates during his career at Pfizer. He has been recognized through Pfizer's Breakthrough Science and Innovation Prize, the Pfizer Worldwide R&D People Leader Award and was also selected as an ACS Organic Division Young Industrial Investigator earlier in his career. He serves as a board member of the Structural Genomics Consortium and was on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry from 2015-2022. He currently works in an outward looking, academically collaborative group for Pfizer looking to better understand protein families and their role in human disease through chemistry. Most recently he led Pfizer's oral protease inhibitor program that ultimately delivered PAXLOVID, the world's first oral anti-viral therapy for the treatment of COVID-19. This work was has been recognized by the American Chemical Society through the Heroes of Chemistry Award, The Royal Society of Chemistry BMCS Lectureship and ’The Honorary Degree of Doctor of Science at Bangor University for Outstanding Scholarship and Innovation’ from his home country of Wales.

Research Field
Research projects aim to decode how the metabolome and proteome, two of the most important classes of molecules in biology, interact at the molecular level. This will generate deeper insight into the function of metabolites (natural products) which have a central role in interactions with therapeutic targets. Development of mass spectrometry-based platforms for unbiased and rapid discovery of bioactive compounds.

Education and Former Professional Experience:
1962 – 1965 BSc (Hons I), University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia (16 May 1966)
1966 - 1969 PhD, University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia (13 May 1970)
1969 - 1971 Faculty Research Associate, Department of Chemistry, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA
1971 - 1973 Post-doctoral Fellow, Departments of Pharmacology and Chemistry, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
1973 - 1974 Research Fellow, Research School of Chemistry, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia
1974 - 1981 Research Scientist, Roche Research Institute of Marine Pharmacology (RRIMP), Sydney, NSW, Australia
1982 - present: Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia
1991-1992 Fellow, Foundation for Promotion of Cancer Research, Japan

Jean‐Luc Wolfender is Professor at the University of Geneva where he leads the phytochemistry bioactive natural product (PBNP) group and he is also Vice Dean of the Faculty of Sciences. Since the 1990s he helped introduce LC-MS and LC-NMR for the profiling of natural extracts for dereplication for accelerating the discovery of novel bioactive compounds. He is currently developing innovative metabolomic approaches based on mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) in various aspects of natural product research and includes LC-MS computational approaches for data mining with a focus on generic assessment natural extracts composition. His research focuses on the discovery of NP-based drugs and evidence-based phytotherapy, and also covers the search for new NP that can be induced in response to stimuli.