Lecture: 'Phage display selection of chemically cyclized peptides for the development of therapeutics'
The laboratory of Prof. Christian Heinis is engaged in the discovery and development of cyclic peptides for therapeutic application. A major focus is the generation of ligands based on bicyclic peptides by phage display. The bicyclic peptides combine key qualities of antibody therapeutics (high affinity and specificity) and advantages of small molecule drugs (access to chemical synthesis, diffusion into tissue, various administration options). In his talk, he will introduce bicyclic peptide phage display, present new chemical reactions that his group have applied to generate structurally highly diverse cyclic peptide libraries, and show recent data on the therapeutic activity of bicyclic peptides in vivo.
About
Prof. Christian Heinis studied biochemistry at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETHZ). After a PhD in the research group of Prof. Dr. Dario Neri at ETHZ, he did two post-docs, the first one with Prof. Dr. Kai Johnsson at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the second one with Sir Gregory Winter at the the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, UK. In 2008 he started as an Assistant Professor at EPFL and was promoted in 2015 to Associate Professor. He is a scientific co-founder of the start-up company Bicycle Therapeutics. Since 2016, he is co-director of the Swiss research network NCCR Chemical Biology.
