4th Alpine Winter Conference on Medicinal and Synthetic Chemistry

Benjamin List was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1968. He studied chemistry at the Free University of Berlin and received his PhD from the Goethe University in Frankfurt (1997, Prof. G. Mulzer). He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla/United States from 1997 to 1998 and as an assistant professor from 1999 to 2003. In 2003, he moved to the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung in Mülheim/Ruhr as head of a research group and became one of the directors there in 2005. He still holds this position today. He also heads a research group at Hokkaido University in Japan and is an honorary professor at the University of Cologne. List has been awarded dozens of prestigious prizes in the field of chemistry. In 2021, he received the Nobel Prize for his work on asymmetric organocatalysis. Benjamin List lives in Mülheim Ruhr, he is married and father of two grown-up sons.

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 invited lectures and is an author on over seventy research papers and patents. 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 recognized by the American Chemical Society through the 2022 Heroes of Chemistry Award and in 2023 with an honorary degree of Doctor of Science at Bangor University for Outstanding Scholarship and Innovation.

Bhaskar C. Das is a Tenured Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences and director of Medicinal Chemistry at the Arnold & Marie Schwartz College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences Long Island University, New York. Dr. Das also holds adjunct professor position at The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, The Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, and The Wake Forest School of Medicine, North Carolina. He did his Ph. D in synthetic organic chemistry from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, India, and M.Phil. from Delhi University India. He received his Postdoctoral training from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)-MA and Harvard Medical School (HMS)-MA and University of Tennessee-TN. Dr. Das directs The Laboratory of Boron in Brain Biology at LIU and his research interests are to develop with/without boron containing small molecular probes/ (radio ligands) to study biology of Retinoic acid, Metabolic and oxidative signaling pathways for brain development to identify biomarkers and development of novel pharmacological agents for Neurodegenerative, Neuro-regenerative, and Neurodevelopmental diseases and Brain cancer-GBM. He has been active in training physicians and scientists at all levels. He has 38 world patents and 109 Peer-reviewed publications. He is reviewer, editor and associate editor on many international journals and also reviewer of many national and international funding agencies (National Institute of Health-NIH, National Science Foundation-NSF, VA, Alzheimer Associations, American Heart Association-AHA, Belgium, Bulgaria, India, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Spain Ministry Science and Education). Based on Dr. Das’s contribution to boron research in June 2014, he received prestigious “Boron in the Americas Award” (for Exceptional Service To Boron Research and Commitment To Excellence) and many national and international awards [2014 , Awarded as International Fellow of the JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, 2011Research Collaboration award (British Pharmacological Society) University of Aberdeen, UK, 2009-Young Investigator Award (Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging Center excellence)].

Yoshihiro (“Yoshi”) Ishihara was born in Japan but raised in Montreal, Canada, where he obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemistry at McGill University. He then obtained his Ph.D. degree under the supervision of Prof. Phil S. Baran at Scripps Research (La Jolla, California, USA), working on natural product synthesis as well as methodologies involving heteroaromatic compounds. He started his industry career as a medicinal chemist at Vertex Pharmaceuticals (San Diego, California, USA), working on both hit-to-lead and lead optimization for ion channel programs (cystic fibrosis and NaV1.8 for acute pain). He is currently at Vividion Therapeutics as a Senior Scientist, working on chemoproteomics, library design, and medicinal chemistry for oncology and immunology targets. His current interests lie in deepening his understanding of the role of various functional groups in medicinal chemistry. He is a co-author of over 20 journal articles and a co-inventor of over 15 patents.

Tracey Pirali is full professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Piemonte Orientale. After the degree in pharmacy in 2004, she gained her PhD under the guidance of Prof. Gian Cesare Tron. She joined the group of prof. Jieping Zhu (Paris, CNRS) and of prof. Michael Greaney (Edinburgh, School of Chemistry) as a visiting scientist. Her laboratory is active in the field of drug discovery and in the translation of academic research into pharmaceutical application, with a focus on oncology, dermatology and rare diseases. She is particularly interested in the use of deuterium, protein degraders, soft drugs and multicomponent reactions and in their application in drug discovery. In 2016 she co-founded ChemICare, a spin-off company committed to the development of calcium channel modulators for the treatment of rare genetic diseases: the most advanced candidate has received two orphan designations from EMA. In 2012 she was awarded the Farmindustria Prize by the Italian Chemical Society. She is a member of the Scientific Committee of the European School of Medicinal Chemistry and coordinator of the Erasmus Mundus EMOTION. She is author of more than 60 papers and inventor of five patents.

Michael Willis is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford. He graduated from Imperial College, University of London, before moving to the University of Cambridge for his PhD studies, working with Professor Steve Ley. He then spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University working with Professor David Evans. In 1997 he returned to the UK and he was appointed to a Lectureship in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Bath. He moved to Oxford in January 2007, and was promoted to Full Professor in 2013. His research interests are based around the development of new catalytic processes and their application in synthesis, which has recently included the development of new catalytic reactions using sulfur dioxide and related sulfur reagents.

Johan is currently working as a Director of DMPK and Clinical Pharmacology at CTC Clinical Trial Consultants in Uppsala Sweden. Within this role, Johan functions as a Scientific Advisor for both preclinical and clinical pharmacokinetics. Johan has in total 20 years of industrial experience within the field of DMPK and has conducted many predictions of human pharmacokinetics and doses, both for the support of compound selection and first-in-human clinical trials. Before joining CTC, Johan worked at AstraZeneca and Medivir in Sweden and at Roche in Switzerland. Johan is a certified Pharmacist, PhD in Pharmacology, and an Associate Professor (Docent) from Uppsala University. He is an author/co-author of approximately 30 peer-reviewed publications and several patent applications. He is a member of the Swedish Pharmaceutical Society, where he is a board member of the pharmacokinetic and metabolism section.

Dr. Grégori Gerebtzoff is Director at the Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research (NIBR). He leads the Modeling & Simulation (M&S) Data Science team since 2020. His team focuses on two main areas: (i) data science and ADME(T) modeling, to extract and generate knowledge from the data generated within the Pharmacokinetic Sciences (PKS) department, aiming at supporting decision making, refining experimental design and improving the understanding of translatability of PK data from the bench to the patient; and (ii) application development and data engineering, by offering custom solutions to increase efficiency, reproducibility, quality and compliance of the data and models generated within M&S and PKS. After completing his M. Sc. in Structural Biology in Montpellier (France) and obtaining his Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of Basel (Switzerland), Dr. Gerebtzoff spent 8 years at F. Hoffmann-La Roche (Roche) in various departments including CADD, Preclinical Safety and Research Informatics. He joined Novartis in 2015 in the M&S group within the PKS, Translational Medicine department.

Andrés Olivares-Morales, Pharm.D, Ph.D. is an accomplished drug developer and leader with more than ten years of experience of applying modeling and simulation to accelerate drug discovery and development. He is a pharmacist from Chile and holds a PhD in Pharmacometrics from The University of Manchester in the UK. Since 2016 Andres works at Roche, first as a DMPK Project leader and currently as a Clinical Pharmacologist, where he leads the design and execution of translational clinical pharmacology, M&S and PK/PD strategies across projects to transform molecules into medicines. Andrés’ research is focused on the development and application of mechanistic physiologically based pharmacokinetics (PBPK) and PK/PD models for translational purposes, precision dosing, and in special populations such as pediatrics, where he has significantly contributed to the field in terms of research publications, abstracts and conferences presentations both as lead, co-author and invited speaker.

Daniele started his independent academic career at the University of Manchester in 2014 were he was promoted to Reader in 2018 and Professor in 2020. In 2022 Daniele and his group moved to the RWTH Aachen University, where he is a Chair of Organic Chemistry. Research in the Leonori group focuses on the development of novel methods exploiting the reactivity of radical and photoexcited species.

Professor Bill Morandi studied at ETH Zürich (2003–2008), receiving a BSc in Biology and a MSc in Chemical Biology. From 2008 to 2012, he pursued his PhD in organic synthesis at the same institution in the labs of Professor Erick M. Carreira. Afterwards, he moved to the California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, CA) for a postdoctoral stay with Professor Robert H. Grubbs. From 2014 to 2018, he was an independent Max Planck Research Group Leader at the Max-​Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung (Mülheim, Germany), before subsequently returning to ETH Zürich as a Professor in 2018. He is currently Full Professor of Synthetic Organic Chemistry and heads the Institute of Organic Chemistry (Laboratorium für Organische Chemie) at ETH Zürich. His research program targets the design and development of new catalytic reactions for the synthesis of small molecules and materials, as well as the valorization of renewable feedstocks and waste material. He has received numerous awards, among them a Novartis Early Career Award in Organic Chemistry, the Carl Duisberg Memorial Prize from the German Chemical Society and a selection as a C&EN's Talented 12. He is currently an Associate Editor for Organic Chemistry Frontiers, a journal from the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Ryan Shenvi is a Full Professor at Scripps Research in La Jolla, CA. His laboratory works at the interface of catalysis, complex molecule synthesis and structural biology. Ryan was born in Wilmington, Delaware and earned his B.S. degree with honors and distinction in chemistry as a Schreyer’s Scholar at Penn State University, where he conducted research with John Desjarlais and Raymond Funk. Ryan earned his Ph.D. in 2008 from The Scripps Research Institute as an NDSEG Fellow under the supervision of Phil S. Baran, and undertook postdoctoral studies as a Ruth L. Kirschstein NIH Postdoctoral Fellow with E. J. Corey at Harvard University. He serves as Advisory Editor on the Angewandte Chemie Scientific Advisory Committee, Executive Editor at the Encyclopedia of Reagents for Organic Synthesis and as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Tetrahedron Chem, ACS Central Science and Accounts of Chemical Research.

Dr Kazuhiro Abe is an Associate Professor, currently serving at the Cellular and Structural Physiology Institute, Nagoya University, Japan. With an extensive expertise in the fields of X-ray crystallography, Cryo-EM, membrane proteins, and P-type ATPases, he has made significant contributions to the understanding of cellular and structural physiology. Dr. Abe's academic journey began with a Bachelor of Science degree from the School of Science at Hokkaido University in May 1999. Driven by a passion for scientific exploration, he pursued further education and obtained his PhD in Science from the Graduate School of Science, Hokkaido University, in May 2004. His outline of research is to determine structures of proton pumps by electron crystallography.

Dr. Rebecca Ebenhoch is a Senior Scientist in the MedChem department of Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma GmbH & Co. KG in Biberach, Germany. Her fields of expertise are X-ray crystallography, cryo-EM, membrane proteins and structure-based drug design. Dr. Ebenhoch's academic journey started in 2011 when she studied biochemistry at the University of Tübingen and Konstanz. Driven by her passion for structural biology, she completed her PhD at the University of Frankfurt in 2019, focusing on the structure determination of pharmaceutically relevant targets using various methods. This was followed by a PostDoc at the SGC in Oxford, where she worked on the structure determination of membrane proteins using cryo-EM. In 2020, she moved to Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma GmbH & Co. KG and established the cryo-EM platform for structure-based drug design.

Dr. Fay is an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and Mol. Bio. at the University of Maryland school of medicine. He has a longstanding interest in membrane proteins and his research efforts are centered primarily on the intersection of the pharmacology and structural biology of membrane proteins. Dr. Fay graduated from Reed College 91, and received is PhD from OHSU in 2012. He did a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Jack Riordan on CFTR before promotion to Research Assistant Professor at UNC chapel hill prior to his current appointment.

Harini Krishnamurthy is currently a Principal Scientist in the Protein and Structural Chemistry group at Merck. She received his PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology from Michigan State University, employing NMR and MD simulations to study the interplay between dynamics, rigidity, and activity in a hyperthermostable enzyme. She then joined Eric Gouaux's lab at the Vollum Institute, Oregon Health and Science University, where she worked on the SLC family of transporters. Her career path in the industry started in 2011 when she joined Heptares Therapeutics and gained extensive experience with structure-based drug discovery against GPCR targets. In 2014, she joined Merck's Structural Chemistry group to help build Merck's capabilities in the membrane protein structure determination arena. Since then she leads several projects in different therapeutic areas working with cross-functional teams and branching into cryoEM, helping the group to achieve the aim of structurally-enabling any target regardless of complexity.

Niginia Borlinghaus was born in Hildesheim, Germany, in 1995 and studied "Life Science" with a focus on organic chemistry at the University of Konstanz. From 2019 to 2022, she did her doctoral studies at AbbVie Germany in Ludwigshafen in the department of Neuroscience Discovery Research in collaboration with the University of Konstanz (Prof. Dr. Wittmann) on organic reactions in water enabled by surfanctants. During that time, she did a visiting scientist at the AbbVie headquarters in Chicago, working on implementing different parallel synthesis platforms, and joined the ACS Green Chemistry Institute Pharmaceutical Roudtable in a focus group on "Chemistry in Water". Currently, Niginia Borlinghaus works at Merck KGaA in Buchs, Switzerland, in a process development department.

Josep Cornella (Pep) was born in La Bisbal del Penedès, a small town in south Catalunya. He graduated in chemistry in 2008 from the University of Barcelona and carried MSc studies in the Department of Organic Chemistry studying the chemistry of allylboron reagents. After completing his masters thesis, he moved to the United Kingdom to pursue doctoral studies in the group of Prof. Igor Larrosa (QMUL). In early 2012, he earned his PhD working on the use of aromatic carboxylic acids as aryl donors in metal-catalyzed decarboxylative reactions. He then moved back to Catalunya, where he joined the group of Prof. Ruben Martin (ICIQ) as a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow. There, he developed novel transformations involving Ni-catalyzed C–O bond activation and carbon dioxide insertion into organic molecules. In 2015, Pep obtained a Beatriu de Pinós Fellowship to carry out further postdoctoral studies in the group of Prof. Phil S. Baran at The Scripps Research Institute, California, USA. During this time at Scripps, he worked on the discovery and implementation of new transformations based on the concept of “redox-active esters” as practical and readily available partners for Ni- and Fe-catalyzed C–C bond forming reactions. In spring 2017, he was appointed as a Max Planck Group Leader in the Department of Organometallic Chemistry at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany.

Timothy Noël is a researcher in the field of synthetic organic chemistry and technology, with a particular interest in the delicate synergy between the two fields. In 2004, Tim earned his MSc degree in Industrial Chemical Engineering before pursuing his passion for synthetic organic chemistry, which led him to complete his PhD in the field at Ghent University in 2009. Following his PhD, he traveled across the Atlantic as a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow to work with Professor Stephen L. Buchwald at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he gained valuable experience and expertise in flow chemistry. Upon returning to Europe, he joined Eindhoven University of Technology as an Assistant Professor in 2012, and later became an Associate Professor in 2017. In 2020, Tim was promoted to Full Professor at the University of Amsterdam, where he is now the Chair of Flow Chemistry. His research in the area of flow chemistry was recognized with several awards, including the DECHEMA award (2017), the Hoogewerff Youth Prize (2019), the IUPAC-ThalesNano Flow Chemistry Award (2020), the KNCV Gold Medal (2021), ERC Consolidator Grant (2022), the ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering Lectureship Award (2022) and the ChemSocRev Pioneering Investigator Lectureship (2023). He is the editor in chief of Journal of Flow Chemistry and the president of the Flow Chemistry Society.

Prof. Paradisi graduated with a BSc in Chemistry and then a PhD in synthetic organic chemistry from the University of Bologna. In 2002 she joined the group of Prof. Engel at University College Dublin for her post doc and started working in the area of Biocatalysis. She got her first academic position in the School of Chemistry in UCD in 2006 where she remained till 2016. She was recruited then by the University of Nottingham as Associate Professor in Biocatalysis and promoted to Full Professor in 2019. In the same year however, she was offered the Chair of Sustainable Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Bern and relocated to Switzerland. Her work focusses on developing eco-friendly and ultra-efficient biotransformations for the synthesis of high-value chemicals, to increasing the applicability of biocatalysis.Flow-biocatalysis and enzyme immobilization are core technologies of the Paradisi Lab.

Helmut Buschmann has studied Chemistry at the RWTH Aachen. After positions hold at Grünenthal GmbH (Aachen), Laboratorius Dr. Esteve S.A. (Barcelona) and SAVIRA Pharmaceuticals GmbH (Vienna) he is now Head of Chemistry, Pharmaceutical Development and Patents at AiCuris GmbH (Wuppertal) and managing director of Research, Development & Consultancy GmbH (Vienna). As a result of his research activities more than 15 NCEs within different therapeutic areas have entered the clinical phase (e.g. Rosonabant, Cizorlitine, Dulopetine, Axamadol). Some of them have reached clinical phase III or are marketed (e.g. Tapentadol: Nucynta® Palexia®). He has authored and co-authored more than 150 scientific and peer reviewed publications, is named as lead inventor in more than 250 patent families and has edited five books in the field of drug discovery and development. He is series editor of the series Methods and Principles in Medicinal Chemistry, which has become a crucial source of information within the medicinal chemistry community and beyond and was established in 1993. In 2014, he was awarded with the IUPAC-Richter Price for the discovery of the pain killer Tapentadol, which is marketed word-wide as Palexia® (Europe) and Nucynta® (US and Canada). Beside this he is member of several scientific advisory boards of public research institutions in Europe and gives lectures at the Universities of Aachen.

Dr. Dimitar Gotchev received a B.S. with honors in chemistry from the University of Zimbabwe and a Ph.D. in organic synthesis from North Carolina State University with Prof. Daniel L. Comins. He then completed his postdoctoral research with Prof. Amos B. Smith, III at the University of Pennsylvania. Dimitar began his industrial career as a medicinal chemist at GlaxoSmithKline in Collegeville, PA. He then transitioned to the biotechnology sector with a move to Trevena, Inc. where he was most notably a team member and inventor of Olinvyk™ (oliceridine) for the management of severe acute pain. Following a brief period at Teva Pharmaceuticals, he then joined Arbutus Biopharma where he currently serves as a Director in Medicinal Chemistry. Over the course of his career, Dimitar led drug discovery programs across several therapeutic areas including CNS, oncology and virology. He and his team have advanced multiple clinical candidates for the prevention of HBV and coronavirus infections. He is an active member of the local scientific community and served as the President of the Philadelphia Organic Chemists Club.

Priscilla earned her PhD in Bio-organic Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. Following postdoctoral training in viral immunology at Scripps Research, she established her own research group combining chemical and pharmacological approaches to address fundamental and translational problems in virology. Her research interests and goals are centered on discovery and validation of new antiviral targets, identifying alternatives to combination therapy for avoiding antiviral resistance, and investigating the function of lipid membranes in RNA virus replication. She likes running and hiking, and when having kids meant finding a hobby she could do while watching the kids, she learned how to knit from her first graduate student. She is a strong advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion in science. After many years at Harvard Medical School, she recently moved with her research group, husband, and three children back to the West Coast where she is Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Mark received his PhD from University College London in 2003. His post graduate research in the laboratory of Professor Karl Hale was synthesising the antitumour macrolide Bryostatins resulting in the enantioselective formal total synthesis of Bryostatin 7. Mark has worked in various roles at KuDOS Pharmaceuticals, Pharminox and PolyTherics/Abzena. He is an expert in the design and development of Antibody Drug Conjugate (ADC) linkers and was instrumental in building Abzena’s site-specific ThioBridge® conjugation technology platform now in Phase II for the production of stable and homogeneous ADCs, as well as Abzena’s site-specific polymer PEGylation linker technology including TheraPEG™, CyPEG™ and HiPEG™, for the half-life extension of peptides and proteins. Mark joined Bicycle Therapeutics in 2022 heading the Peptide, Organic and Medicinal Chemistry Groups in the UK, involving the design and development of bicyclic peptide drugs and conjugates. Mark’s focus is in developability assessment and he has 42 publications and patents in the field of early stage drug discovery.

Christian P. R. Hackenberger studied chemistry at the Universität Freiburg and the UW Madison/Wisconsin (M.Sc. with Prof. Samuel Gellman) and performed his doctoral studies at the RTWH Aachen with Prof. Carsten Bolm. After a postdoctoral stay at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with Prof. Barbara Imperiali, he founded his own research group at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2005 as an Emmy Noether fellow. In 2012, he was appointed as Leibniz-Humboldt Professor and Department Head for Chemical Biology at the Leibniz-Research Institute for Molecular Pharmacology (FMP Berlin) and the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. His group develops highly selective chemical and chemoenzymatic strategies to functionalize proteins and antibodies to generate protein-based therapeutics against cancer, Alzheimer and viral infections. In addition, he pioneered the development of cell-permeable antibodies for intracellular targeting. He is a co-founder of the Munich-based company Tubulis, which engineers better tolerable cancer drugs, especially antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), using conjugation technologies from his lab, in particular the P5-labeling platform. Recent awards include the Leonidas Zervas Award from the European Peptide Society (2018), the Xiaoyu Hu Memorial Award from the Chinese Peptide Society (2023) and the Protein and Peptide Astra Zeneca Award from the Royal Society (2023). In 2020, he was the first recipient of the Falling Walls breakthrough of the year award in the Life Sciences, recognizing his contributions to develop next-generation biopharmaceuticals.

Vijaya Pattabiraman is a Co-founder of Bright Peak Therapeutics and serves as Chief Technology Officer. Dr. Pattabiraman has made seminal contributions to Bright Peak’s technology and brings in extensive expertise and know-how in peptide and protein sciences. He has more than 15 years of experience in biomolecules, small molecules discovery and development for academic and translational research. He is co-inventor on multiple patents and has co-authored several peer-reviewed publications, book chapters in the field of chemical protein synthesis, peptide antibiotics and small-molecules therapeutics. Dr. Pattabiraman has fostered many academic and biotech collaborations and leads a multi-disciplinary global team. He is also a co-founder of Synple Chem, a start-up focused on automation in chemistry. He received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Alberta, Canada and performed his postdoctoral studies with Prof. Bode at University of Pennsylvania, USA and at ETH Zürich, Switzerland.