Targeting RNA

Elliot Nickbarg

Elliot Nickbarg received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago and a doctorate in Chemistry from Harvard University. Originally from western New York, he has have lived in the Boston area for a while, working at both large and small biotech and pharmaceutical companies. He joined Merck in 2010 as part of the Schering Plough merger. 

Dr Maria Duca

Dr. Maria Duca is head of the Targeting of Nucleic Acids research group in the Institute of Chemistry of Nice (Université Côte d’Azur - CNRS). After undergraduate studies in Pharmacy and Medicinal Chemistry (Faculty of Pharmacy, Bologna, Italy), she obtained her PhD in Molecular Biochemistry under the supervision of Dr. Paola B. Arimondo (National History Museum, Paris, France), working on topoisomerase II inhibitors targeting specific DNA sequences.

A two-year post-doctoral training in Sydney Hecht’s lab (Departement of Chemistry, University of Virginia, USA) allowed her to pursue the study of nucleic acids/small molecules interactions working on targeted protein mutagenesis upon tRNA chemical modification. After CNRS recruitment as a Research Scientist in 2007, her research activities focus on the targeting of non-coding RNAs using synthetic small molecules toward innovative therapeutic approaches both for anticancer and antimicrobial applications.

Dr Gerhard Mueller

Gerhard Mueller is Chief Scientific Officer at Gotham Therapeutics, a transatlantic biotech company located in New York City, US, and Munich, Germany, focusing on epitranscriptomic drug discovery. Prior to his appointment at Gotham Therapeutics, he held several research management positions at biotech companies such as Axxima Pharmaceuticals, Munich, and GPC Biotech, Munich and Boston. Most recently, he built from scratch the Medicinal Chemistry business unit at Mercachem, a chemistry service provider in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

Before his career within the biotech industry, Gerhard held several senior research and project management positions within the pharmaceutical industry, i.e. at Glaxo Group Research in Verona, Italy, at Bayer AG, Leverkusen, Germany, and he headed the medicinal chemistry unit at Organon N.V. in Oss, NL. Gerhard obtained his PhD from the Technical University Munich, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Horst Kessler establishing the research field of antiadhesive integrin antagonists.

During his career, Gerhard has worked on several disease areas prosecuting different target families, among them protein kinases, proteases, GPCRs, integrins, protein-protein interaction targets and epigenetic enzymes and receptors. From this work, close to 10 clinical candidates emerged, and Gerhard is co-author of more than 75 scientific publications and numerous patents.

Professor François Fuks

Dr Michal Minczuk

Dr Kamal Azzaoui

Saverna Therapeutics’ main aim is to discover and develop new molecules for therapeutically areas such inflammation, oncology and infectious diseases. They use a platform based on Fragment Screening using NMR coupled with Machine Learning to identify molecules targeting none coding RNAs.