Vertical integration: Combining computational and experimental biophysics with synthetic chemistry and molecular biology to drive innovation in cancer biology
John F. Trant
Associate Professor and Faculty of Science Research Chair
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
University of Windsor
Thursday, October 24, 2024
9 a.m.
Hybrid: C2-361 and Teams
Abstract: Based on a fateful late night, beverage-filled session at a conference in 2015, I realized what I wanted to do as a professor. My friends running programs at major pharmaceutical companies told me, a by-then career postdoc, that their biggest challenge with hires was the inability of the new staff to communicate and understand what other scientific disciplines bring to drug discovery and development. I decided that if anyone gave me a chance to run a research group, I would try to centre that needed interdisciplinary training and build the research program around it. Consequently, that’s what I aimed to do when I started at UWindsor in 2016. It all just happened a bit faster than I thought. Many outstanding problems in biomedical sciences are hard to solve, and as our understanding of molecular and medical science improves, the remaining challenges, on average, become harder. At this point, no single tool, or even set of tools is appropriate to all challenges, and science requires flexibility in approach, but more importantly, integration of multiple tools. I will discuss the value in reaching outside, but firmly standing in, my core discipline of organic chemistry to help answer questions in cancer, autoimmune disease, and infectious disease by fully integrating, picking from, and innovating a variety of computational, synthetic, biological, analytical and biophysical tools best suited to a challenge. The talk will emphasize how this provides learning opportunities to personnel, and how it has led to a rich research culture. Examples will include developing macrocycles for inhibiting antibiotic resistant bacteria, uncovering why PSMA-negative prostate cancers still show up on scans using PSMA-targeting imaging agents, why p53 restoration-of-function drugs are complicated, and why you should totally resynthesize that awesome positive hit you got in your assay from that compound you isolated from bacteria. I will also touch on why undergrad research is an essential ingredient for success, even in a lab driven by postdocs. The emphasis will be on the benefits of tool and expertise integration and development, but we will also just touch on how cool it is that we operate in an era where these tools exist for us to use.