Current group & alumni

Marko Hyvönen

Marko tries to bring the money in and keep the group on the straight and narrow. Ventures to lab on occasions, only to be scowled at by those who actually know that they are doing. He is still allowed to repair Emulsiflex as and when needed (=too often).

Paul Brear

Paul is always busy curing cancer by inhibiting CK2α, Btk and other new targets with small molecules and peptides. In between research he runs the Crystallographic core facility and coordinates our Diamond Light Source beamtime.

Caio Vinicius dos Reis

Caio works with Alborada Drug Discovery Institute (ADDI) bringing FBDD component to their efforts to find treatments for neurogenerative diseases.

Agnieszka Bogucka

Agnieszka is part of a WT-funder project with Grøtli and Boren groups from University of Göteborg targeting liver pyruvate kinase for the treatment and prevention of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).

Shiv Kumar Sah Teli

Shiv works on various extracellular targets with Bicycle Therapeutics to help with their inhibitor development processes.

Lena Quambusch

Lena uses chemical biology approaches to interrogate with TGF-ß family members mediated signaling.

One part is validating Activin A as a druggable target in a proof-of-concept study utilizing Fragment-based Drug Discovery (FBDD) to evolve small molecule inhibitors to impair signaling.

Lena is further applying chemical genetics to covalently link the Activin A dimer and assess the dependences of the inter-protomer angle towards signalling capacity.

Nicola Coker Gordon

Nicola keeps the lab running and provides support to various research projects.

Emma Belcher

Emma is dealing with some pesky transmembrane receptors, taming them for structural and biophysical analyses to understand signalling mechanism better.

Gwen Pyeatt

Gwen is exploring the wonderful world of protein binding molecules to validate prevention of pro-form dissociation as a mechanism of activin A inhibition. Classes of molecules being investigated include designed ankyrin repeat proteins (DARPins), nanobodies, and de novo proteins. These binders could be put to use in the future as therapeutics for muscle atrophy disorders and fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva and/or molecular tools to study activin A signalling.