Sebastian A.

I am a seasoned scientist with experience across the fields of chemical biology and drug discovery. The basis of my science is organic chemistry and I have spent several years performing structure guided design and synthesis of molecules for drug discovery. This experience is augmented with a wide variety of biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology techniques. Past Research Work During my postdoctoral work at Imperial College in the group of Prof. Ed Tate, I worked on a drug discovery project involving a transmembrane enzyme. I led a small team from high throughput screen output to a candidate with in-vivo applicability. This included hit confirmation and selection, structure guided compound design, performing and optimising biochemical assays, setting up and performing cellular assays and PK studies up to in vivo dosing. This work also included me spearheading the development our cellular assay kit using CRISPR/Cas gene editing. I have also successfully raised >300k worth of academic research funding for this project. In my PhD I studied molecular glues for 14-3-3 protein-protein interactions in the group of Prof Christian Ottmann and Prof. Luc Brunsveld. This work included design and synthesis of novel molecular glue compounds. I wanted to expand my activities in this area to include semi-synthesis on a class of natural products call Fusicoccins. This led me to perform a secondment in the group of Prof. Nobuo Kato at Osaka University, the absolute leader in the field. To study the effect of my compounds, I expanded my skillset to include a broad range of assays such as FP, SPR, ITC, MST and X-ray crystallography. I managed to generate and characterise the most potent 14-3-3 molecular glue reported to date, and set up a method to characterise three body binding events such as a molecular glue and two proteins. Current Research Work I am currently setting up a completely new research project from scratch in the field of metabolic oligosaccheride engineering applied to wastewater treatment. This is a challenging project with real world application in which I am attempting to unravel the function of sialic acids in aerobic granular sludge wastewater treatment plants. This involves the synthesis glycan probes for metabolic labelling and applying this methodology to the extracellular polymeric substance of Candidatus Accumulibacter cultures in liter scale bioreactors.