Medicinal Chemistry

Dr Justin Warne, Senior Scientific Officer

Justin joined the ICR in 2018, with a significant experience of design and synthesis of PROTAC molecules on a variety of disease areas, having previously worked as a synthetic medicinal chemist at Evotec, Arrow Therapeutics and UCL. Justin is a co-author of 5 publications and 5 patents, and worked on the forerunner to the Centre, the CRBN project in collaboration with Monte Rosa Therapeutics, aiding in the development of a large molecular glue library.

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Medicinal Chemistry

Dr Ellie Stammers, Postdoctoral Training Fellow

Ellie joined the ICR in January 2023. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of York, including a year working in industry at Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel, Switzerland. Ellie then went on to obtain her PhD from the University of Bristol under the supervision of Professor Jonathan Clayden and Dr Alastair Lennox, where she developed an electrochemical methodology for biaryl synthesis. Her work at the ICR involves the development of novel E3 ligase mediated degraders.

Biology

Marc Leiro, Scientific Officer

Marc joined the ICR in February 2024. He completed his degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Barcelona, followed by a specialised master’s in Biomedical Research at Pompeu Fabra University. Currently, Marc works as a Scientific Officer at Charlotte Pawlyn’s Lab in the Myeloma Biology and Therapeutics Team which focusses on identifying therapeutic targets to improve outcomes for patients with immunomodulatory drug resistant and high-risk myeloma. He supports the biology aspects of CPD projects, screening and profiling degraders.

Assay development and biophysics

Nihar Ranjan Prusty, Higher Scientific Officer

Nihar obtained a PhD in Structural Biology at the Magnetic Resonance Center (CERM), University of Florence, Italy, where his research was focussed on Fe-S protein biogenesis in human cytosol. Then he went on to pursue Postdoctoral research at the University of Potsdam, Germany, where he mainly worked with a radical-SAM enzyme, responsible for Mo cofactor biosynthesis, and established Fe-S cluster insertion pathways to the enzyme. He has ample experience in expression and purification of metalloproteins in the E. coli system and their characterisation by various spectroscopic techniques. He joined the ICR in June 2023 as a Higher Scientific Officer and is currently working on projects under the CPD for protein production, purification and biophysical characterisation.

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Crystallography

Dr Marc Cabry, Senior Scientific Officer 

Marc joined the Hit Discovery and Structural Design team at the ICR in January 2018, having completed his PhD in Mechanistic Biology at the University of York in 2017. Marc is involved in the structural characterisation of ternary complexes for several protein degradation projects within the Centre.

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Cryo-EM

Dr Stephen Hallett, Senior Scientific Officer

Stephen is an expert in the field of cryo-Electron Microscopy and joined the Centre in 2022, after a PhD in the Northern Institute of Cancer Research at Newcastle University and a post-doc at the University of Sussex, in the Genome Damage and Stability Centre. Stephen is the first author of 3 publications and is involved in the structural characterization by cryo-EM of ternary complexes for several protein degradation projects.

In silico Chemistry

Dr Natalia Serrano Aparicio, Postdoctoral Training Fellow

Natalia joined the in silico Chemistry team at the ICR in 2022, having completed her PhD at the University Jaume I, in Castellon de la Plana (Spain) in Theoretical Chemistry and Computational Modelling. Natalia is an author of 6 publications and is involved in driving the in silico chemistry pipeline for protein-protein docking and PROTAC design in the Centre.

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Biology

Dr Charlotte Pawlyn, Group Leader

Charlotte Pawlyn is a CRUK Clinician Scientist at The Institute of Cancer Research and a Haematology Consultant at The Royal Marsden Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. Charlotte leads the Myeloma Biology and Therapeutics Team at The Institute of Cancer Research which focusses on identifying therapeutic targets to improve outcomes for patients with immunomodulatory drug (IMiDs) resistant and high-risk myeloma. In addition to her laboratory studies Charlotte is actively involved in the Trial Management Groups of several clinical trials as part of the UK Myeloma Research Alliance including the large national frontline studies, Myeloma XI and Myeloma XIV. She utilises her broad cancer biology and degrader experience to support biology aspects of projects within the CPD.

Yann-Vaï Le Bihan, Staff Scientist

Yann-Vaï is a structural biologist with expertise in X-ray crystallography applied to drug design, as well as protein biochemistry and biophysics. Yann-Vaï completed a PhD in molecular biophysics at the university of Orléans (France) in 2009, followed by two post-docs at the CEA (Saclay, France) and IBS/ESRF (Grenoble, France). He joined the ICR as a post-doctoral researcher within the Hit Discovery and Structural Design (HDSD) team in 2014 and was since promoted to a Staff Scientist position to oversee the protein production, biophysics and structural biology activities of the HDSD team within the Centre for Cancer Drug Discovery. Yann-Vaï has been actively involved in the targeted protein degradation work undertaken at ICR since 2016, which led to the creation of the spin-out company Monte Rosa Therapeutics in 2019 and of the Centre for Protein Degradation in 2022.

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Craig McAndrew, Senior Scientific Officer

Craig graduated with a PhD in 1996 at the Marie Curie Research Institute (Oxted) supervised by Collin Goding. He then did a Postdoc at the Randall Institute (KCL) with Louis Mahdevan, and he joined the ICR (Centre for Cancer Therapeutics) in 1999 as a Postdoc, working on CDK4/6 with Michelle Garratt. In 2003, Craig became responsible for producing/purifying recombinant proteins for the centre. Craig has expertise in cloning & protein production and knowledge in biophysics.

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Olivier Pierrat, Senior Scientific Officer

Olivier joined the Hit Discovery and Structural Design team at the ICR in February 2014, after his postdoctoral research experiences at the University of Reading (cardiovascular), MRC-LMB (with MCT-T/LifeArc), John Innes centre and Texas A&M University. Profiting of his experience acquired at the ICR, Olivier’s work concentrates on developing assays measuring in cell target engagement of PROTAC and molecular glue molecules using the NanoBRET technology (Promega UK Ltd) and immunofluorescence. This includes E3 ligase target engagement, ternary complex formation and protein degradation in the cellular context.

Mark Stubbs, Higher Scientific Officer

Mark joined the Hit Discovery and Structural Design team at the ICR following a BA Honours in Biochemistry at Oxford and a PhD in Southampton. Mark is involved in the compound management, liquid handling and assay development for the Centre for Protein Degradation.

Andrea Scarpino, Principal Computational Scientist

Andrea joined the ICR in July 2021 as a Postdoctoral Training Fellow. He previously received a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship to work in the Medicinal Chemistry Team at the Research Centre for Natural Sciences in Budapest, where he completed his PhD focusing on the development of covalent docking protocols for drug discovery. Andrea provides computational chemistry support to several drug discovery projects at the ICR and is currently leading the research activities of the In Silico Medicinal Chemistry team. Andrea also contributes to research projects in the Centre for Protein Degradation by applying computational methods to aid the design and optimisation of protein degraders.

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Konstantinos (Costas) Mitsopoulos, Staff Scientist – Bioinformatics

Costas joined the ICR as a Bioinformatics staff scientist in 2007, transitioning from the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Reasearch (post-doctoral fellow in Computational Biology), and following a Bioinformatics MRes (Birkbeck), four years of post-doctoral experience in cancer cell biology (KCL) and a PhD in Membrane Protein Assembly (Sussex University). He has been working in the CCDD (formerly CTU) since 2013, providing bioinformatics support to several drug discovery projects. He is currently leading the research activities in the Computational Biology and Chemogenomics Team. His role in the CPD encompasses structural bioinformatics-driven discovery of degron motifs for molecular glue target candidates, target ligandability assessments based on 3D structures, available chemical matter and patient profiles and proteomics-based hit discovery and profiling for molecular glues and PROTACs.