PLENARY KEYNOTE SESSIONS

Monday, May 2 | 4:10 – 4:55pm

Challenges and Opportunities in Developing Non-Antibody Protein Therapeutics
Jennifer R. Cochran, PhD, Shriram Chair & Professor, Bioengineering & Chemical Engineering, Stanford University
Protein therapeutics are dominating the pharmaceutical market, a steadily increasing trend that started with human insulin in 1982. Monoclonal antibodies used to treat cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and other diseases now account for a large share of these efforts, yet the notion that an antibody could be manufactured at scale and delivered to a patient as an effective therapeutic regimen was initially met with much skepticism. My presentation will discuss challenges and opportunities for developing non-antibody engineered protein therapeutics as next-generation medicines.

Monday, May 2 | 4:55 - 5:40pm

PEGS 2022 YOUNG SCIENTIST KEYNOTE HONOREE
Designing Signaling Antibodies to Enact Anti-tumor Responses
Xin Zhou, PhD, Assistant Professor, Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, Harvard Medical School; Principal Investigator, Cancer Biology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
The world of protein engineering is fascinating, full of possibilities to create molecules with new and desirable structures and functions. My presentation will introduce how we work at the interface of disease biology and protein engineering, designing, constructing, and evolving versatile proteins for the development of next-generation molecular technologies, diagnostics, and therapeutics.

Wednesday, May 4 | 11:30am – 12:15pm

Future Directions in Drug Discovery & Development
Roger M. Perlmutter, MD, PhD, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairman of Eikon Therapeutics
The intrinsic complexity of human physiology has generally defeated attempts to model normal cellular functions, meaning that until recently we have had few tools to disentangle the molecular pathology associated with common illnesses. Now, dramatic improvements in instrumentation, automation, and computing provide ways to measure dynamic responses in living cells, and to use these measurements to identify both new disease targets, and new chemical starting points for future medicines. These fundamental advances, coupled with improvements in clinical trial design and execution, together offer hope that the new therapeutics landscape will include compounds with superior therapeutic indices, developed at lower cost. I will illustrate how these opportunities might materialize, drawing examples from current research that integrates image analysis, computation, engineering, molecular biology, and medicinal chemistry.