Stephen W. Fesik, Ph.D.
Orrin H. Ingram II Chair in Cancer Research
Professor of Biochemistry, Pharmacology, and Chemistry
The focus of our lab is on drug discovery using fragment-based methods and structure-based design. To accomplish this goal, we have assembled a multidisciplinary team that includes structural biologists, medicinal chemists, and cell biologists. In our lab, we clone, express, and purify proteins, conduct fragment-based screens, determine the three-dimensional structures of protein/ligand complexes using NMR and/or X-ray crystallography, design and synthesize compounds, and test compounds in primary and secondary biological assays.
The main interest of our lab has long been cancer drug discovery. The cancer drug targets that we are pursuing include highly validated but technically challenging such as KRAS, MYC, Wnt, and Mcl-1. We have also identified novel small molecule ligands for E3 ligases and have synthesized and characterized many PROTACs to degrade protein targets. In addition to cancer, we have worked on antiviral targets for SARS-CoV-2 (PL protease) and alphaviruses (nsp2 protease). More recently, we have also recently become interested in the longevity field, and are seeking opportunities to apply our fragment-based methods in this area.
