Speaker Biographies

Anne Marinier, PhD, Principal Investigator and Director of Medicinal Chemistry, IRIC and Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry, Université de Montréal

Anne Marinier brings along more than 25 years of experience in medicinal chemistry and a strong industry expertise in all aspects of drug discovery. Before joining IRIC, Dr Marinier was Group Leader in the Drug Discovery Research group at Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) and was involved in the identification of pre-clinical candidates while contributing to the progression of programs in oncology, immunology and infectious diseases. As director of IRIC Medicinal Chemistry, she currently heads IRIC’s medicinal chemistry platform, which comprises more than 40 chemists and biologists and supports drug discovery programs from IRIC scientists and collaborators. The laboratory has a strong expertise in Structure-Activity Relationships development and compound optimization and focuses also on structure-based drug design as well as devising chemical probes for novel biological target identification. Two molecules discovered in collaboration with BMS, have successfully completed Phase I trial and one of them will be further progressed in Phase II. A further compound, UM171, an enhancer of hematopoietic stem cell renewal, was developed with Dr Guy Sauvageau, and has just completed a Phase I/II clinical study. This has led to the creation of the biotechnology company ExCellThera, for which she is one of the founders and Chief Technology Officer, Chemistry.

J. Adam Hendricks, PhD, Associate Principal Scientist, Discovery Biology, Discovery Sciences, IMED Biotech Unit, AstraZeneca

Adam Hendricks earned his Ph.D. as a National Science Foundation (NSF) predoctoral Fellow at Northeastern University in the lab of Robert Hanson synthesizing selective estrogen receptor modulators. After completion he moved to the Center for Systems Biology of MGH/HMS under the mentorship of Ralph Mazitschek as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) postdoctoral fellow. His work at CSB was in the field of epigenetics via the synthesis of tool compounds and applying them to study histone deacetylases. After a 3 year postdoc he joined the newly formed Chemical Biology group in Discovery Sciences at AstraZeneca in 2013. Since joining he has primarily focused on the target identification of small molecules from phenotypic screens, safety profiling of lead candidates and target engagement studies.