Andrea Cochran's Biography

Andrea Cochran, Principal Scientist, Early Discovery Biochemistry, Genentech

Cochran received her PhD in 1991 from the University of California, Berkeley Department of Chemistry for research developing catalytic antibodies. During postdoctoral training at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, she studied structural aspects of transmembrane signal transduction by bacterial chemotaxis receptors. In 1996, Cochran joined the Genentech Protein Engineering Department (now Early Discovery Biochemistry Department), where she has remained. Her research interests focus on inhibition of medically relevant protein-protein interactions, but have included also biophysical studies of folding in short peptides, mitotic Aurora kinases and their regulators, ubiquitin ligases and deubiquinases, and structural aspects of Wnt signaling. A recent focus has been biochemistry and drug discovery efforts aimed at epigenetic regulators, especially bromodomain-containing proteins.