Webinar: Measuring Protein Motion to Enable Drug Discovery and Development

Date: Thursday, March 20

Time: 5:30-7:00pm

If you would like to attend, register in advance for this webinar.

After the webinar, you are invited to talk to the speaker and mingle with other alumni in a post-webinar social via a Zoom meeting.

We look forward to seeing you.

Peter Tong, PhD (MS ’81, PhD ’85)

Measuring Protein Motion to Enable Drug Discovery and Development

By Roger Perlmutter, CEO of Eikon

Beginning with the development of antimicrobial agents in the 1950s, modern pharmaceutical development has greatly reduced age-specific death rates from cardiovascular disease and cancer, among other illnesses. However, the productivity of the pharmaceutical industry has declined exponentially over at least the last 50 years. In my view, the single most important reason for this is our inability to model the regulatory circuits, at the molecular level, that control human physiology. For this reason, we only rarely can identify the causes of a disease, and hence we can only speculate about possible ways of ameliorating an ongoing disease process.

Eikon’s automated single-molecule tracking instruments can track hundreds of thousands of proteins across dozens of cells in less than a second, generating high-dimensional data that describes protein motion and, more broadly, protein “interaction states”. These high-throughput assays also permit genome-wide genetic screens that define the extent to which reduced expression of any one protein alters the interaction state of a potential partner, illuminating the ways in which many different proteins may associate under various physiological conditions.

Studies like these offer the promise of accelerating target identification, drug discovery, and, through the identification of appropriate biomarkers, drug development. I will provide examples that document the utility of measuring protein dynamics in living cells.

About the Speaker

Roger M. Perlmutter is President, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairman of Eikon Therapeutics, Inc., a private biotechnology company that employs advanced imaging technologies to identify novel therapeutic candidates by virtue of their effects on protein dynamics in living cells.

He was previously Executive Vice President, Merck & Co., and President of Merck Research Laboratories where he supervised the discovery and development of more than two dozen lifesaving medicines, including KEYTRUDA™, Merck’s foundational immuno-oncology therapeutic, which continues to transform cancer care throughout the world. Before that Roger was for 12 years Executive Vice President and head of R&D at Amgen, Inc., where he is credited with having revolutionized the development of biopharmaceuticals for the treatment of autoimmune disease, osteoporosis and cancer-related bone disease, and for the reduction of hypercholesterolemia-related cardiovascular risk.

Prior to his work in the biopharmaceutical industry, Roger was a professor in the Departments of Immunology, Biochemistry and Medicine at the University of Washington, Seattle, and Chairman of the Department of Immunology, where he was at the same time an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His research focused on delineating signaling pathways that control lymphocyte activation. Prior to moving to Seattle, he was a lecturer in the Division of Biology at the California Institute of Technology.

A graduate of Reed College and the Washington University (St. Louis) School of Medicine, Roger is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and both a Distinguished Fellow and past president of the American Association of Immunologists.

Our Alumni Volunteers‍

The following alumni work together to serve you:
Avni Gandhi, Dave Adler, Jane Frommer, Mike Klein, Susan Huynh, and Peter Tong.