Learning from nature's switches to develop new drug targets and biotech tools

Speaker

Kevin Gardner
Director, CUNY Advanced Science Research Center

Kevin Gardner is the founding director of the Structural Biology Initiative of the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center and a Distinguished and Einstein Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the City College of New York. Combining approaches from biochemistry to drug discovery, his research group has uncovered atomic-level mechanisms of proteins used by cells to sense and respond to changes in the environment around them. This work has led to better understanding of fundamental biology and established novel routes to artificially control protein activity, as exhibited by new cancer therapies and optogenetic tools used in academia and biotech.

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The ASBMB Breakthroughs webinar series offers a window into the cutting-edge biochemistry and molecular biology research driving discovery.

Environmental cues regulate many cellular pathways in response to changing conditions. Such regulation is often initiated by sensory protein domains with small molecule ligands that convert environmentally-triggered changes into altered protein–protein interactions. Combining biochemistry, structural biology and other approaches, we study the mechanisms of such domains to understand both fundamentals of biological signaling and how these might be artificially controlled for therapeutic or biotech purposes. Here Kevin Gardner will discuss several examples of this principle, showing how our work into light- and oxygen-regulated signaling proteins led to novel optogenetic tools and a first in-class anti-cancer therapeutic (Merck’s HIF-2 inhibitor belzutifan).