Epigenetics in Drug Discovery Keynote Speakers

James Audia Chief Scientific Officer, Constellation Pharmaceuticals Dr. Jim Audia joined Constellation in January 2011 following a highly productive career in drug discovery at Eli Lilly and Company. Dr. Audia held several key leadership roles during his 23-year tenure at Lilly. As a Distinguished Lilly Scholar, the highest level of the company’s scientific ladder, he made seminal technical and strategic contributions to the Lilly drug pipeline. Prior to this role, Dr. Audia was Executive Director, Discovery Chemistry Research and Technologies, where he had global responsibility for delivery of small molecule drug candidates across all therapeutic areas. He also played a major role in companywide leadership of product strategy and portfolio management for Lilly for more than a decade. Over the course of his career, Dr. Audia’s scientific work has contributed to more than 12 development candidates, including transformative contributions to the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease through his discovery of both the first gamma secretase inhibitor and an industry-leading beta secretase inhibitor. Dr. Audia is a named inventor on more than 90 issued US patents and has published and presented extensively. He received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of South Carolina and did postdoctoral training at Yale University before joining Lilly.
Danica Fujimori Principal Investigator, University of California, San Francisco Danica Galonic Fujimori is Associate Professor of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology and Pharmaceutical Chemistry at University of California, San Francisco. Research in her lab focuses on mechanisms, regulation and biological functions of post-translational and post-transcriptional methylation. The Fujimori lab investigates mechanisms by which the jumonji family of histone demethylases, a class of epigenetic “eraser” proteins, is regulated on chromatin through a cross-talk of catalytic and chromatin reader domains in these enzymes. Additionally, the Fujimori lab has developed chemical probes that target jumonji demethylases. Dr. Fujimori is a recipient of Searle Scholar Award, V Foundation Scholar Awards, Kimmel Scholar Award, and National Science Foundation CAREER award, among others.
Stefan Knapp Professor, Goethe Institut Frankfurt Stefan Knapp studied Chemistry at Marburg University (Germany) and the University of Illinois (USA). He did his PhD at Prof. Ladensteins laboratory at the Karolinska Institute (Stockholm, Sweden) where he also remains as a postdoctoral scientist. In 1999 he joined Pharmacia (Nerviano, Italy) and stayed there until 2004. Since 2004 he works as a principal investigator at the SGC, University of Oxford. In 2015 he joined the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the Goethe University in Frankfurt as well as the Buchmann Institute for Life Sciences (BMLS). He is a visiting Professor at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine and the SGC where is still maintains a research group.
Dafydd Owen Associate Research Fellow, Pfizer Ltd Dafydd Owen has eighteen years of experience as a medicinal chemist in the design and synthesis of drug-like molecules for Pfizer at its Sandwich UK and Cambridge MA research sites. He is currently an Associate Research Fellow within Pfizer Worldwide Medicinal Chemistry where he works in an outward looking, academically collaborative group for Pfizer, researching chemical probes for epigenetic targets. He obtained his first degree at Imperial College in 1994 before moving to the University of Cambridge to gain a PhD under the supervision of Professor Steve Ley in 1997. Having won a research fellowship for postdoctoral work, he spent 1998 with Professor Leo Paquette at Ohio State University. During his research career has delivered over fifty invited lectures and is also an author on over thirty research papers and patents. In 2009 he was the recipient of a Pfizer Worldwide R&D People Leader Award. In the same year he was selected as an ACS Organic Division Young Industrial Investigator.