Confirmed Speakers

Eric Valeur has over 15 years drug discovery experience gained at small, mid-size and large pharma/biotech companies including Merck, Novartis, and AstraZeneca. He has led medicinal chemistry and project teams across several therapeutic areas and across modalities, including small molecules, macrocycles, peptides, oligonucleotides, drug conjugates, and PROTACs, delivering clinical candidates and novel technologies. In 2019, he joined Flagship Pioneering to create first-in-category biotech companies and lead their R&D teams, further aligning with his passion for novel science, unprecedented therapeutic targets and disruptive drug discovery. Eric is coauthor/coinventor of over 50 publications, patents, posters, and oral presentations and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh (under supervision of Prof. Mark Bradley) and an MBA from Imperial College London.

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Hélène Adihou studied in Strasbourg,France, where she received adegree in engineering and an MSc in chemistry. She completed her PhD in 2012 under the supervision of Dr.Vincent Aucagne and Dr.Agnès Delmas, at the Center of molecular biophys-ics in Orléans, France. She then moved to the group of Prof. Helge Bode at the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, for post-doctoral work on the synthesis of non ribosomal peptides. Currently she is a senior research scientist within the AstraZeneca-MPI satellite unit in Dortmund, developing protein-protein interaction modulators.

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Dr Maria DUCA is head of 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, University of Bologna, Italy), she obtained her PhD in Molecular Biochemistry under the supervision of Dr Paola B. Arimondo (National Natural History Museum, Paris, France) working on topoisomerase II inhibitors. A 2-year post-doctoral training in Sydney Hecht’s lab (Department of Chemistry, University of Virginia, USA) allowed her to pursue the study of nucleic acids working on targeted protein mutagenesis. 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.

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Sébastien Papot was born at the end of the second millennium and grew up in Niort (France) with his parents and two brothers. His bachelor degree in hands, he went to the University of Poitiers (France) where he studied organic chemistry. He obtained a Ph.D. in 1998 under the supervision of Prof. Jean-Pierre Gesson. The subject of his thesis was the study of glucuronide prodrugs for cancer chemotherapy. Then, he moved successively to the University of Orléans (Prof. G. Guillaumet, France) and the University College Cork (Prof. A. Maguire, Ireland) as a post-doctoral fellow working on several projects in the area of medicinal chemistry. During his stay in Cork, he became very interested in beer, especially Irish beer.
In 2003, he moved back to Poitiers to start an academic career as an Assistant Professor. In 2014, he accepted a full professorship in the same university. He is currently the group leader of the “Programmed Molecular Systems” team. His research interests include the design of smart drug delivery systems for cancer chemotherapy, functional interlocked systems and prebiotic chemistry. Prof. Sébastien Papot is also the President of the French Society of Medicinal Chemistry and the cofounder of Seekyo, a privately-owned biotech company developing the next generation of chemotherapies.

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Marc Robillard is founder and CEO of Tagworks Pharmaceuticals, a spin-out of Philips Healthcare. Tagworks develops in vivo chemistry to improve the efficacy of cancer therapies and to enable novel approaches in companion diagnostics. Prior to spinning out in 2011 he worked at Philips Research on molecular imaging and drug delivery and at Kreatech Diagnostics on microarray detection. Marc obtained his MSc and PhD in bio(in)organic chemistry at, respectively, the University of Groningen and the Leiden Institute of Chemistry, The Netherlands.

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Leendert van den Bos obtained his MSc- and PhD-degree in bio-organic chemistry from Leiden University. He joined Organon BioSciences as a Scientist in 2007 and worked subsequently for Schering-Plough, Merck Sharp & Dohme and Aspen Pharmacare mostly in the field of Process Research & Development. In Dec 2018 he joined EnzyTag, a Dutch biotech start-up active in the field of enzymatic technologies for ligating peptide bonds. His areas of expertise include process development, QbD, continuous manufacturing, PAT, enzyme engineering.

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Dr Siying Zhong is a medicinal chemist working for the PROTAC drug discovery collaboration between Professor Alessio Ciulli’s lab and Boehringer Ingelheim. Siying studied Chemistry at the University of Sheffield where she obtained a master’s degree in Chemistry in 2014. She received her Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Bristol in 2018 for her work on studying solution-state molecular conformations of flexible small molecules under the supervision of Professors Craig Butts and Varinder Aggarwal.

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