Molecular Discovery Seminar Series

All seminars are given at NCI-Frederick on Thursdays at 10:00am in the Building 549 Auditorium, unless otherwise stated.

Spring 2020

Jan 23Jaclyn Winter (Univ of Utah)
"Developing Microorganisms for Drug Discovery"
Feb 13Brian Shoichet (Univ of California, San Fransicso)
"Docking >500 million available molecules to discover new chemotypes with new biology"
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the remainder of the Spring 2020 Molecular Discovery Seminar Series has been cancelled.

Fall 2019

Sep 12Ron Raines (MIT)
"Ghost Proteins"
Sep 26Yamuna Krishnan (Univ of Chicago)
“Quantitative Chemical Imaging in Live Cells”
Oct 03Robert Cichewicz (Univ of Oklahoma)
“Seeking the Forest for the Trees: Finding Patterns and Chemistry Encompassing 3,531,905 Square Miles of Fungal Habitat”
Oct 10Doug Johnson (Biogen)
“Application of Chemical Biology Probes and Bioorthogonal Chemistry in Drug Discovery”
Oct 24Bobby Arora (New York Univ)
"Rational Design Strategies for Targeting Protein-Protein Interactions in Cancer"
Nov 07Michael Cohen (Oregon Health & Science Univ)
“Decoding Protein ADP-ribosylation Networks in Cells Using Chemistry-based Approaches"
Nov 21Eric Strieter (UMass-Amherst)
"Uncovering the Cryptic Functions of a Deubiquitinase"
Dec 05Kristi Kiick (Univ of Delaware)
"Phase-Separating (POLY)Peptides in the Design of Advanced Biomaterials"
Sponsored by the CBL Women in Chemistry
Dec 12Mano Manoharan (Alnylam Pharmaceuticals)
“Biometric Chemistry of Human RNAi Therapeutics”

Spring 2019

Mar 07Miguel Castanho (Univ of Lisbon, Portugal)
“Membrane-targeting peptides: from antimicrobial to anticancer”
Mar 21Dirk Trauner (New York Univ)
"Controlling Protein Levels and Function with Photopharmacology"
Apr 04Eric Kool (Stanford Univ)
“Small Molecules for Study and Control of RNA”
Apr 25Rahul Kohli (Univ of Pennsylvania)
“Capturing TET-mediated DNA demethylation in action”
May 09Dehua Pei (The Ohio State Univ)
“Drugging “Undruggable” Targets with Macrocyclic Peptides”
May 23Kai Johnsson (Max Planck Institute)
"Fluorescent and Bioluminescent Sensor Proteins"
May 30Hendrik Luesch (Univ of Florida)
"Natural Products from Marine Cyanobacteria as Starting Points for Drug Discovery and Development"

Fall 2018

Sep 20Rick Wagner (University of Minnesota)
"Non-Genetic Engineering of Cell-Cell Interactions for Cancer Immunotherapy and Beyond"
Sep 27Lou Charkoutian (Haverford University)
“Capturing transient interactions of proteins involved in natural product biosynthesis”
Oct 04Jen Heemstra (Emory University)
“Small-molecule detection and enantiopurity measurement using DNA-based sensors”
Oct 25Mary Kay Pflum (Wayne State University)
"Histone Deacetylase Proteins: Inhibitor Design and Substrate Identification"
Nov 08*Laura Kiessling (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
“Probes of Dendritic Cell Lectins”
*Sponsored by the CBL Women in Chemistry
Nov 29Kamil Godula (University of California, San Diego)
“Chemical tools for tailoring glycan interactions at the cell-matrix interface”
Dec 06Sarah Slavoff (Yale University)
"Translation and functions of small open reading frames"
Dec 13Marcy Waters (University of North Carolina)
“New Tools for Studying Epigenetic Protein-Protein Interactions”

Spring 2018

Feb 15Minkui Luo (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center)
"Chemical Interrogation of Protein Methyltransferases: Function, Inhibition and Mechanism”
Mar 01Michelle Arkin (Univ of California, San Francisco)
"Tackling Challenging Drug Targets, a Biophysical Perspective"
Apr 19Karen Wooley (Texas A&M Univ)
"Expanding the Scopes of Synthetic Organic and Polymer Chemistry"
May 03Matt Francis (Univ of California, Berkeley)
"New Synthetic Tools for Making Protein-Based Material"
May 10Nadja Cech (Univ of NC at Greensboro)
“Untargeted metabolomics to Identify Bioactive Natural Products: Getting from What’s here? to What matters?"
May 31David Chenoweth (Univ of Pennsylvania)
"Design and synthesis of new chemical tools for probing, manipulating, and imaging biological systems"

Fall 2017

Sep 14Brian Bachmann (Vanderbilt Univ)
"Discovery of primary tumor cell selective effector molecules using single cell multiplexed activity metabolomics"
Sep 21Sam Achilefu (Washington Univ in St. Louis)
“Light-Mediated Cancer Imaging and Treatment”
Oct 05M.G. Finn (Georgia Tech)
“Click Reactions and Protein Nanoparticles: Building Functional Structures with Chemistry and Molecular Biology”
Nov 02Sid Hecht (Arizona State Univ)
“Protein synthesis with Non-proteinogenic Alpha and Non-alpha Amino Acids”
Nov 09Catherine Leimkuhler Grimes (Univ of Delaware)
"Breaking down Bacterial Cell Walls to Understand Inflammation"
Nov 16John Denu (Univ of Wisconsin, Madison)
"How Metabolism Informs the Epigenome"
Nov 30Paola Castaldi (AstraZeneca)
“Chemical Biology Strategies Applied to Drug Discovery”
Dec 07Bing Xu (Brandeis Univ)
“Enzyme-Instructed Peptidic Nanostructures for Selectively Inhibiting Cancer Cells”

Spring 2017

Jan 12Dustin Maly (Univ of Washington)
“Allosteric Modulation of Protein Kinases with Small Molecule Inhibitors”
Mar 23Michael Rossmann (Purdue Univ)
“The Structure of Zika Virus”
Mar 30Alexei Demchenko (Univ of Missouri, St Louis)
“From Stereocontrolled Glycosylation to the Automated Oligosaccharide Synthesis”
Apr 13Ting Xu (Univ of California, Berkeley)
“Toward Protein/Peptide-based Functional Hybrid Materials”
Apr 20Dennis Dougherty (California Institute of Technology)
“High-Precision Studies of Drug-Receptor Interactions in the Nicotinic Receptor”
Apr 27Steven Zimmerman (Univ of Illinois, Urbana)
Targeting the DNA and RNA That Causes Disease Using Small Molecules and Polymers”
May 04 Eric Schmidt (Univ of Utah)
“Accessing novel structural and bioactivity classes of marine natural products”
May 11Chris Vanderwal (Univ of California, Irvine)
“Synthesis Strategies to Address Bioactive Natural Product Families”

Fall 2016

Sep 8Phil Cole (Johns Hopkins Univ)
"Bivalent Approaches to Drug Discovery"
Sep 29Bruce Armitage (Carnegie Mellon Univ)
“Fluorescence Imaging Reagents Based on RNA Aptamers, Synthetic Polymers and Fluorogenic Cyanine Dyes”
Oct 6Mark Distefano (Univ of Minnesota)
“Protein Lipid Modification: New Chemistry and New Biology”
Oct 20Gary Martin (Merck)
“Evolving NMR Capabilities: The Impact on What is Possible”
Oct 27Bradley Smith (Univ of Notre Dame)
“Near-infrared Fluorescent Multivalent Molecular Probes for Biological Imaging”
Nov 3Danzhou Yang
“Structure and Function of DNA G-quadruplexes and Its Potential as Anticancer Drug Target”
Nov 10John Magnani (GlycoMimetics)
“The design, evaluation and clinical development of novel glycomimetic drugs for inflammatory disease and cancer”
Nov 17Dustin Maly (Univ of Washington)
“Allosteric Modulation of Protein Kinases with Small Molecule Inhibitors”
Dec 8Eric Martin (Novartis)
"Profile-QSAR Gen 2: Deep learning Kinase IC₅₀ predictions for novel compounds as accurate as 4-pt IC₅₀s"

Spring 2016

Jan 21 Michael Strano (Massachussetts Inst of Technology)
“Fluorescent Carbon Nanotube Sensor Arrays and CoPhMoRe Binding for Label Free Glycoprofiling”
Feb 18 Richard Houghten (Torrey Pines Inst for Molecular Studies)
“The Direct Phenotypic Screening in Mice Using Large and Chemically Diverse Combinatorial Libraries”
Mar 10 Ben Miller (Univ of Rochester)
“Altering Protein Recording with Synthetic RNA Binders in HIV and Beyond”
Mar 31 Alex Deiters (Univ of Pittsburgh)
“Optical Control of Biological Processes in Cells and Animals”
Apr 14 Dennis Discher (Univ of Pennsylvania)
“Macrophage Recognition of ‘Self’ for Nano-and Micro- applications against solid Tumors"
Apr 21 Susan Mooberry (Univ of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio)
“Looking to Nature to Discover Effective Treatments for Triple Negative Breast Cancers”
May 12 Kwaku (Theodore) Dayie (Univ of Maryland)
"Custom Made Nucleotides for RNA NMR"

Fall 2015

Sep 10 Rob Britton (Simon Fraser Univ)
“New Reactions and Strategies for Natural Product and Drug Synthesis”
Oct 8David Piwnica-Worms (MD Anderson Cancer Ctr)
“Molecular Imaging Strategies for Dynamic High Throughput Screens”
Oct 15Linda Baum (Univ of Cal – Los Angeles)
“Assembly of Glycan-lectin Lattices Creates Functional Microdomains on the Cell Surface”
Nov 5Yitzhak Tor (Univ of Cal – San Diego)
“New Isomorphic Fluorescent Nucleosides for Studying RNA-based Processes”
Nov 19Linda Hsieh Wilson (Cal Inst of Tech)
“Carbohydrate Signaling in Neurobiology and Cancer”
Dec 10Kevin Gardner (City University of New York)
“Environmentally-controlled protein/protein interactions: Nature’s switches, scientists’ tools”

Spring 2015

Jan 22Glenn Prestwich (University of Utah)
"Clinical Biomaterials for Regenerative Medicine: From Bench to Business to Bedside"
Feb 5Heran Darwin (New York University)
"Mycobacterium tuberculosis, proteasomes, pupylation and... plant hormones?"
Feb 12Paul Thompson (University of Massachusettes Medical School)
"Picking the PADlock: Chemical Probes to Characterize PAD Biology"
Feb 26Sean Brady (Rockefeller University)
"Watch where you step, there is new chemistry everywhere"
Mar 19Patricia Clark (University of Notre Dame)
"Synonymous Codon Substitutions: Not So 'Silent' After All"
Apr 16Sandra Lee (Merck, Inc)
"Discovery of Novel, Selective Spleen Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitors for the Treatment of Rheumatoid Arthritis"
Apr 23Klaus Hahn (University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill)
"Protein engineering to image and control Rho family GTPase signaling in motility"
May 14Paul Hergenrother (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
"Anticancer drug discovery, from simple and complex compounds"

Fall 2014

Sep 18James Bradner (Harvard Medical School/Dana Farber Cancer Institute)
"Chemical Modulation of Chromatin Structure and Function"
Oct 2Roger Linington (University of California, Santa Cruz)
"Connecting Phenotype and Chemotype: Development of an Integrated Platform for the Direct Prediction of Natural Products Mode of Action"
Oct 16Jianghong Rao (Stanford University)
"A biocompatible condensation reaction between cyanobenzothiazole and aminothiol and its application for molecular imaging"
Oct 23 Jen Prescher (University of California, Irvine)
"Expanding the imaging toolbox"
Oct 30 Milan Mrksich (Northwestern University)
"Combining Arrays and Mass Spectrometry for High Throughput Discovery in Biology"
Nov 13 Joel Collier (University of Chicago)
"Supramolecular Peptide Immunomodulators"
Nov 20Samie Jaffrey (Cornell University)
"Imaging RNA and RNA biology using RNA mimics of green fluorescent protein"
Dec 4Amy Rosenzweig (Northwestern University)
"Copper, natural products, and biological methane oxidation"

Spring 2014

Mar 27Luke Lavis (HHMI-Janelia Farms)
“Old Dyes, New Tricks: Building Better Fluorophores for Biology”
Apr 10John Porco (Boston University)
“Chemical Synthesis and Biological Studies of Antitumor Natural Products”
Apr 24Gregg Fields (Torrey Pines Inst. For Molecular Studies)
“Modulation of Cell Surface Proteolytic Activity”
May 1Gary Sulikowski (Vanderbilt University)
“Synthesis and Study of Natural Products of Possible Relevance to Human Health”
May 15Judith Frydman (Stanford University)
“Chaperone control of cellular proteostasis in health and disease”
May 29Hening Lin (Cornell University)
“Sirtuins and novel protein posttranslational modifications”
June 5Ron Schnaar (Johns Hopkins University)
“Glycan Recognition in the Control of Inflammation”

Fall 2013

Oct 24Magid Abou-Gharbia (Temple University)
“Discovery of innovative therapeutics: Today’s realities and tomorrow’s vision”
Nov 7John MacMillan (UT Southwestern Medical Center)
“Integration of microbial natural products with high-content screening for cancer drug discovery”
Nov 14Sam Gellman (University of Wisconsin)
“Mimicry of Protein Surfaces with Alpha/Beta-Peptide Foldamers”
Nov 21David Fushman (University of Maryland)
“Deciphering the “Ubiquitin Code”: Synthesis and Structure-Function Analysis of Non-Canonical Polyubiquitin Chains”
Dec 5Tom Kodadek (The Scripps Research Institute - Florida)
“Chemical Tools to Monitor and Manipulate the Proteome”
Dec 12Anna Mapp (University of Michigan)
“Small Molecule Transcriptional Modulators”
Dec 19Ryan Looper (University of Utah)
“New methods to access biomedically interesting guanidinium ion scaffolds”

Spring 2013

Jan 31Justin DuBois (Stanford University)
"Turning Toxins into Tools for the Study of Ion Channels"
Feb 21Thomas Williamson (Merck, Inc)
"ADEQUATE: NMR Experiments With an Expanding Role in Structure Elucidation"
Apr 4Angela Koehler (The Broad Institute)
“Small-molecule probe discovery for transcriptional regulators”
May 2Chris Lima (MSKCC)
“Structural insights to post-translational modification by Ubiquitin and
Ubiquitin-like proteins”
May 23Jeff Aube (University of Kansas)
“Chemical Probes”
May 30Jon Thorson (University of Kentucky)
"New strategies and tools for natural product diversification and discovery"

Fall 2012

Aug 23Julia Kornfield (Cal Tech)
"Crosslinking of Ocular Tissues"
Sep 20Ron Koder (City College NY)
"Protein Design Approaches to Cancer Therapies"
Oct 4Bill Gerwick (UCSD - SIO)
"The Fabulous Natural Products of Marine Cyanobacteria: Structures, Biological Activities, Biosynthetic Pathways"
Nov 8Derek Tan (MSKCC)
"Diversity and Design: New Chemical Probes for Biology and Medicine"
Dec 13David Spiegel (Yale University)
“Using Small Molecules to Engineer and Explore Human Immunity”

Spring 2012

Mar 1John Toscano (Johns Hopkins University)
"Nitroxyl (HNO): Nitric Oxide's Neglected Sibling"
Mar 12*Jim Wells (UCSF)
"Challenging Targets: Reaching for High Hanging Fruit in Drug Discovery"
*NOTE: This seminar is on MONDAY
Apr 5Phil Dawson (TSRI)
"Chemical Ligation: From Post-Translationally Modified Proteins to Nanoparticle Engineering"
Apr 19Paul Hanson (University of Kansas)
"Phosphate-Tether Mediated Methods to Bioactive Natural Products and Analogs"
May 3David Lawrence (UNC at Chapel Hill)
"Cells Are Poor Cuvette Models: Challenges and Prospects of Molecular Probes for Intracellular Biochemistry"
May 24Peter Wipf (University of Pittsburgh)
"In Search of the Silver Bullet- Redefining the Academic Drug Discovery Trajectory"

Fall 2011

Sep 15Ted Molinski (UCSD)
"Marine Natural Products. Scope, Synthesis-Aided Discovery, and New Approaches"
Oct 6Ben Shen (Scripps Florida)
"Natural Products Drug Discovery: Challenges and Opportunities"
Oct 13Hai-Quan Mao (Johns Hopkins University)
"Controlled Condensation of DNA and Self-Assembled Polymer/DNA Micelles for Liver-Targeted Gene Delivery"
Nov 3Carlito Lebrilla (UC - Davis)
"Quantitative Measurements of Protein Glycosylation in Diseases and Health"
Nov 10Cheryl Arrowsmith (University of Toronto)
"Structural and Chemical Biology of Readers and Writers of the Histone Code"
Nov 17Matt Bogyo (Stanford University)
"Probing Protease Function Using Small Molecules: Applications from Cancer to Malaria"
Dec 1*Kylie Walters (University of Minnesota)
"Targeting Proteins for Destruction" * Please note: This seminar will be at 11am instead of 10am.

Spring 2011

Jan 20Jiyong Hong (Duke University)
"Natural Product Synthesis at the Interface of Chemistry and Biology"
Feb 3Chris Ireland (University of Utah)
"Antitumor Agents from Marine Organisms"
Feb 24Matt Francis (University of California, Berkeley)
"New Chemical Methods for Site Selective Protein Modification"
Mar 24Dan Kahne (Harvard University)
"How does a cell make more of itself"
Apr 14Brad Moore (University of California, San Diego/Scripps Institution of Oceanography)
"Genomics-inspired Discovery and Bioengineering of Natural Product Drugs"
May 5Darrell Irvine (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
"New materials and new methods for cancer immunotherapy and vaccine delivery"
May 19Bruce Yu (University of Maryland)
"Developing Imaging Agents for 19F MRI"

Fall 2010

Aug 19Pieter Dorrestein (University of California, San Diego)
"Translating Adaptive Metabolism with Imaging Mass Spectrometry"
Sept 9Peter Andreana (Wayne State University)
"Targeting Cellular Immunity with Entirely Carbohydrate-based Constructs"
Sept 16David Corey (University of Texas Southwest Medical Center)
"Controlling Gene Expression with Synthetic Nucleic Acids"
Oct 7Scott Miller (Yale University)
"Diverse Peptide-Based Catalysis for Diversification of Biologically Interesting Scaffolds"
Oct 21Don Engleman (Yale University)
"pH-Dependent Transmembrane Peptide Insertion: Mechanism and Uses in Drug Delivery and Tumor Imaging"
Nov 18Henry Kopecek (University of Utah)
"Smart Biomaterials and Drug Delivery Systems"

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