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 Wellcome Trust-funded project with Morten Grøtli and Jan Boren groups from University of Göteborg, Sweden,  targeting liver pyruvate kinase for the treatment and prevention of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).

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 dependencies of the inter-protomer angle towards signalling capacity.

Attila Tököli

Attila is joining BBSRC-funded sLoLa (strategic longer and larger) project, lead by Florian Hollfelder, to discovery new plastic degrading enzymes, plastizymes. Attila will be working with people from the Hollfelder group, as well with Christine Orengo’s group at UCL and with Rob Finn’s group at EMBL-EBI

Attila will be in charge of structural characterisation of the new enzymes and studying their interactions with the substrate.

Léni Jodaitis

Léni works on an Apollo Therapeutics funded project to develop inhibitors for an exciting new cancer target. He will be applying fragment-based and structure-guided drug discovery methods to find first fragment hits and then optimise these to generate starting points for a lead development  that could eventually (fingers crossed!) progress to the clinic.

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.

Allan Roldão

Allan has joined us for a FAPESP-funded “BEPE” gap year from the Department of Biochemistry at the University of São Paulo where is doing a PhD with Deborah Schechtman studying the role of PLCγ in pain sensing. Allan will be learning the ropes of structural biology and fragment-based drug discovery during his time in Cambridge.

Archibald Coombs

Archie is working on an INEOS-funded PhD project in collaboration with Andres Floto’s group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and with David Spring’s group at the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry to tackle antimicrobial resistance on Mycobacterium tuberculosis.