Speaker Short Biography
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Jeff Zhang
CEO
Aubrak Therapeutics
Short Biography
Dr Jeff Zhang has extensive working experience in new drug discovery and development and understands the development trend of the global pharmaceutical industry. During his tenure in many multinational pharmaceutical companies, he led or participated in the invention of dozens of new compounds that can be used to treat a variety of diseases, such as analgesia, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular, neurodegeneration, cancer and immune system diseases. Among them, nine drugs have been successfully approved and marketed. Worked at a number of well-known multinational pharmaceutical companies, such as Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis, for 28 years. Served as Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) of Youngene Therapeutics, and currently serves as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Aubrak Therapeutics. He graduated from Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica with a Ph.D degree in organic chemistry and had postdoctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt University.
Presentation Topic: Development of VAV1 molecular glue for the treatment of autoimmune diseases
Molecular glue degraders (MGD) function to induce structural changes in ubiquitin ligases, such as cereblon, to drive the formation of ternary structures with a target protein. Following binding of cereblon to the target, this protein is then ubiquitin tagged and subsequently degraded via the proteasome-mediated degradation machinery of the cell. MGDs can induce degradation of otherwise‘undruggable’ proteins as the mechanism does not require a classical binding pocket,contrary to conventional protein inhibitors, significantly increasing the target space and potential utility across a range of disease.VAV1 expression is highly restricted to immune cells. VAV1 is required for antigen receptor-mediated signaling of T- and B-cells. CRISPR-mediated or genetic loss of VAV1 is associated with decreased effector functions of both T and B cells. Given the in vitro and in vivo MOA profile shown, VAV1 MGDs has strong potential to alleviate disease symptoms in multiple autoimmune and inflammatory diseases including rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, and psoriasis, amongst others.
