At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, efforts to develop drugs and vaccines were hampered by the limited knowledge of the molecular details of how SARS-CoV-2 infects cells.
In this webinar, UCSF professors Brian Shoichet and Nevan Krogan discussed their work in mapping out virus-human protein interactions, and the subsequent identification of known drugs that exhibit antiviral activities by targeting human proteins. They also shared strategies used to coordinate this large-scale project which was published in a Nature article with more than 100 co-authors.
The Shoichet lab at UCSF School of Pharmacy seeks to discover chemical reagents that can illuminate biological problems. A longstanding effort to do so is by exploiting protein structures to predict new reagents and therapeutic leads (structure-based ligand discovery).
Dr. Shoichet received his B.Sc. from MIT and Ph.D. from UCSF. He was an Associate Professor at Northwestern University Department of Molecular Pharmacology & Biological Chemistry, before returning to UCSF where he is now a Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry.
Dr. Krogan's lab at UCSF focuses on developing and applying quantitative, systematic proteomic and genetic approaches to study complex biological and biomedical problems. At present time, the Krogan group is focused on studying cancer, infectious disease and psychiatric disorders.
Dr. Krogan was born and raised in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of Regina and his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto