Join us for the Department of Chemistry’s annual Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson Lecture, delivered by Professor Stuart Schreiber.
Abstract
Discovering new medicines from biological research has shown we need fresh approaches to drug discovery. This lecture explores molecular glues and bifunctional compounds – proximity-inducing compounds, and offers a framework to understand and exploit their underlying mechanisms. We will discuss advances in the discovery of these compounds and how they can change the behaviour and cellular lifespan of their targets, potentially leading to ground-breaking new treatments.
See also “The Rise of Molecular Glues”, Cell, 2021, 184, 3-9; “Molecular Glues & Bifunctional Compounds: Therapeutic Modalities Based on Induced Proximity”, Cell Chem. Biol, 2024, 31, 1050-1063.
About the Speaker
Join us for an inspiring talk by Stuart Schreiber, the Morris Loeb Professor at Harvard and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Stuart has been honoured with prestigious awards such as the Arthur Cope Award and the Wolf Prize. His academic journey began with a B.A. from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. from Harvard. After teaching at Yale, he joined Harvard in 1988. Stuart is a prolific entrepreneur, having founded over a dozen biotech companies, including Vertex and Ariad Pharmaceuticals. His latest venture, Arena BioWorks, aims to revolutionise drug discovery.
About the Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson Annual Lecture
The Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson Annual Lecture celebrates the legacy of Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson, a pioneering English chemist whose six-decade career at Imperial significantly advanced inorganic chemistry and homogeneous transition metal catalysis. Sir Geoffrey’s journey began in 1939 as an undergraduate at Imperial, where he later completed his PhD in 1943. After gaining international experience, he returned to Imperial in 1956 as a Professor of Chemistry, a position he held for 32 years. His ground-breaking work in organometallic chemistry earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1973, and he was knighted in 1976. Even after becoming Professor Emeritus in 1988, he continued to contribute to the field with a small research group. In 2022, the Department of Chemistry inaugurated this annual lecture to honour his remarkable contributions.
