Time：9:00-10:30 AM，Thursday, Mar. 9th，2023

Host：Dr. Qi Hu, PI of School of Life Sciences

Speaker:

Ziyang Zhang, Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley

Ziyang graduated from Peking University with a BSc in Chemistry in 2011 where he studies natural product synthesis with Profs. Zhen Yang, Jiahua Chen and Yefeng Tang.  As an HHMI Predoctoral Fellow, he did his PhD training with Prof. Andrew Myers at Harvard University and developed a platform for the synthesis of new macrolide antibiotics.  As a Damon Runyon postdoc fellow with Prof. Kevan Shokat at UCSF, he devised chemical strategies for the brain-specific inhibition of kinases and the mutant-specific targeting of KRAS-driven cancer.  He started his independent research at UC Berkeley in 2022. He has authored 20 research papers and 10 patents. 

Abstract:

A major challenge in drug design is targeting the disease-driving mechanism without perturbing the normal function of healthy cells.  In this talk, I will discuss how to address this challenge by exploiting unique chemical features inexorably linked to the diseased state.  I will describe how a highly modular total chemical synthesis of macrolide antibiotics provides a powerful tool for generating variants that overcome antibiotic resistance.  I will then focus on cancer cell signaling and new strategies that utilize two therapeutic agents simultaneously to overcome current challenges to oncology drug discovery.  I will describe how to target the critical kinase mTOR (mechanistic target of Rapamycin) only in the tissue where cancer is forming and not the rest of the body to enhance therapeutic efficacy and mitigate toxicity in glioblastoma, a lethal form of brain cancer.  Lastly, I will report on an approach that leverages the immune system to attack the intracellular “undruggable” oncogene K-Ras (G12C), which can overcome primary drug resistance to current small molecules targeting this oncogene in lung and colon cancer.  

Contact：

Wenyue Yu: yuwenyue@westlake.edu.cn

School of Life Sciences