Keynote speaker Frank C. Schroeder, professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Cornell University, talked about his research on “metabolomic dark matter,” the vast numbers of small molecules in animal model systems, which play central roles in regulating growth and development, yet remain largely unknown. Discovering and characterizing these molecules could reveal new signaling paradigms and tools to manipulate and investigate biology, which could uncover new leads for drug development.
Allison Didychuk, assistant professor at Yale School of Medicine and Yale Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, studies the biology of the herpesvirus, specifically how the virus cleverly encodes its own molecular machinery and packages its own genomes to carry out a new infectious period. Nine herpesviruses can infect humans. These viruses can cause reoccurring rashes and cold sores and, in some cases, health complications, such as cancer or birth defects in offspring.
“This is an ongoing problem because we actually have no cure for any herpesvirus,” said Didychuk. “We are in need of small molecule drugs to help treat herpesvirus infections with the ultimate goal of finding a cure or improving preventative measures.”
The lab of David Spiegel, professor of chemistry and of pharmacology, develops new paradigms for how drugs work to treat human diseases. One such focus is on bifunctional molecules, where one head is responsible for the effector function of a molecule and the other for the targeting function. Two bifunctional programs the lab has worked on are MoDEs (molecular degraders of extracellular proteins) and ARMS (antibody recruiting molecules).
Spiegel explained, “They address specific limitations that come with conventional therapeutics,” such as toxicity from sustained exposure by degrading disease-causing proteins, rather than simply inhibiting them.
“The human genome encodes roughly 20,000 genes as coding genes,” said Hongying Shen, assistant professor of cellular and molecular physiology at Yale School of Medicine and Systems Biology Institute at Yale West Campus. “We still estimate thousands of metabolic enzymes and transporters encoded in human genomes are of unknown function.”
The Shen Lab studies cellular metabolism. In particular, they try to understand the function of metabolic enzymes and transporters that are implicated in organismal and cellular pathology that might be relevant to immunological and neurologic diseases.
“Oxidative stress is a problem for all living things on Earth with deep implications for human health and disease,” said Stavroula Hatzios, assistant professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology and of chemistry. “And one of the big biological questions that motivate our work is understanding how bacterial and host cells adapt to oxidative stress during infection.”
The Hatzios Lab at the Microbial Sciences Institute uses chemical tools to discover new molecular mechanisms of host-microbe interaction in gastrointestinal (GI) infections. She described the biology of an antioxidant compound taken up by H. pylori, which infects the GI tract and causes severe gastric pathologies, such as gastritis, peptic ulcers, and gastric cancer.
