The Scientist’s LabTalk

In 2021, the world changed for drug research and discovery when researchers published advances that used AI and machine learning to predict the structure of human proteins from their sequences. With discoveries like this, scientists are launching the generative biology revolution where they strive to leave the guesswork behind and instead use computers to quickly tailor biological molecules for therapeutic purposes. In this episode, we speak with Alan Russell, vice president of Biologics at Amgen and review what generative biology is and how it helps scientists understand proteins from their amino acid building blocks to their folded, three-dimensional structures. We also discuss how this new field improves the quality and complexity of biologic drug candidates and the speed with which researchers generate them.

To dive further into this topic, please join Amgen scientists at the Generative Biology Q&A webinar discussion on July 20th, 2022. Register for the event here.

Welcome to The Generative Biology Revolution, a special edition podcast series produced by The Scientist’s Creative Services Team. This series is brought to you by Amgen, a pioneer in the science of using living cells to make biologic medicines. They helped invent the processes and tools that built the global biotech industry, and have since reached millions of patients suffering from serious illnesses around the world with their medicines.

Generative biology is a revolutionary approach to drug discovery and development that leverages machine learning and AI to design novel protein therapeutics. It holds the potential to enhance the speed and efficiency of discovery. In this series, Ray Deshaies, senior vice president of Global Research at Amgen, discusses how generative biology is transforming drug discovery to make it more predictable, shorten timelines, and increase success rates of bringing life-saving medicines to patients who need them most.

As smart devices become commonplace in many homes, they also enter life science laboratories with the promise to enhance productivity, simplify collaborations, and produce reliable results. In this episode, Niki Spahich from The Scientist’s Creative Services team spoke with experts from MilliporeSigma about how smart devices change research for the better.

LabTalk is a special edition podcast produced by The Scientist's Creative Services Team, where we explore topics at the leading edge of innovative research. This month’s episode is sponsored by MilliporeSigma.

Cancer immunotherapies are saving lives, but researchers still have a long journey ahead of them. Many cancers that are initially sensitive to immunotherapy acquire resistance over time, while others are resistant from the beginning.

In this episode, Niki Spahich from The Scientist’s Creative Services team spoke with Stephanie Dougan, an associate professor of immunology at Harvard Medical School and a principal investigator at Dana Farber Cancer Institute, about her research developing new immunotherapies for resistant tumors.

LabTalk is a special edition podcast produced by The Scientist’s Creative Services Team, where we explore topics at the leading edge of innovative research. This month’s episode is sponsored by 10x Genomics.

Induced proximity makes it possible for scientists to attack undruggable targets by designing medicines that go beyond what conventional drugs can accomplish. Within the next decade, this work could yield new options for treatments for cancer and other diseases that currently have poor prognoses. People whose serious diseases don’t respond to conventional medicines, or who run out of options, may see induced proximity drugs come to the rescue. In this episode, Ray Deshaies is joined by David Reese, executive vice president of Research and Development at Amgen. Dave is responsible for Amgen’s entire pipeline of potential therapies, and he has had a long-standing interest in oncology, both at Amgen and in his pre-Amgen career in academic research and medical practice.

Undruggable is a special edition podcast series produced by The Scientist’s Creative Services Team. This series is brought to you by Amgen, a pioneer in the science of using living cells to make biologic medicines. They helped invent the processes and tools that built the global biotech industry, and have since reached millions of patients suffering from serious illnesses around the world with their medicines.

Beginning with the introduction of aspirin at the start of the 20th century, there have been three major waves of innovation in drug discovery. While breakthrough discoveries have been made, 85% of disease targets are still considered undruggable, which represents an ongoing barrier to discovering medicines for complex diseases like cancer and autoimmune conditions. Ray Deshaies, who has spent decades in academic research and is a senior vice president at Amgen, believes that the fourth wave of innovation is here, led by new types of multispecific medicines that will radically alter our concept of how drugs can work and pave the way for new solutions.

PROTACs have taken center stage in the effort to drug the undruggable. Researchers are now exploring other types of TACs to degrade or alter undruggable targets by bringing them together with effector proteins. In this episode, Ray Deshaies talks to Carolyn Bertozzi, professor of chemistry at Stanford University, about alternative induced proximity platforms. Notably, her research centers around lysosome targeting chimeras, or LYTACs, that target extracellular proteins for degradation by the endosome-lysosome pathway.

To dive further into this topic, please join Amgen scientists at the Undruggable Q&A webinar discussion on November 17, 2021. Register for this event here: Undruggable Q&A

Undruggable is a special edition podcast series produced by The Scientist’s Creative Services Team. This series is brought to you by Amgen, a pioneer in the science of using living cells to make biologic medicines. They helped invent the processes and tools that built the global biotech industry, and have since reached millions of patients suffering from serious illnesses around the world with their medicines.

Beginning with the introduction of aspirin at the start of the 20th century, there have been three major waves of innovation in drug discovery. While breakthrough discoveries have been made, 85% of disease targets are still considered undruggable, which represents an ongoing barrier to discovering medicines for complex diseases like cancer and autoimmune conditions. Ray Deshaies, who has spent decades in academic research and is a senior vice president at Amgen, believes that the fourth wave of innovation is here, led by new types of multispecific medicines that will radically alter our concept of how drugs can work and pave the way for new solutions.

Even with promising technology such as PROTACs breaking through the barriers of undruggability, finding compounds that interact with tricky targets requires screening billions of molecules. DNA encoded library technology is revolutionizing how drug developers screen molecules by marking them with unique DNA tags. In this episode, Ray Deshaies talks to Alex Gouliaev, vice president of Amgen Research Copenhagen. Prior to joining Amgen, Alex was the CEO of Nuevolution, a pioneer in DNA-encoded libraries.

To dive further into this topic, please join Amgen scientists at the Undruggable Q&A webinar discussion on November 10, 2021. Register for this event here: Undruggable Q&A

Undruggable is a special edition podcast series produced by The Scientist’s Creative Services Team. This series is brought to you by Amgen, a pioneer in the science of using living cells to make biologic medicines. They helped invent the processes and tools that built the global biotech industry, and have since reached millions of patients suffering from serious illnesses around the world with their medicines.

Beginning with the introduction of aspirin at the start of the 20th century, there have been three major waves of innovation in drug discovery. While breakthrough discoveries have been made, 85% of disease targets are still considered undruggable, which represents an ongoing barrier to discovering medicines for complex diseases like cancer and autoimmune conditions. Ray Deshaies, who has spent decades in academic research and is a senior vice president at Amgen, believes that the fourth wave of innovation is here, led by new types of multispecific medicines that will radically alter our concept of how drugs can work and pave the way for new solutions.

Childhood cancer is devastating. Every year over 15,000 children in the United States are diagnosed with cancer, with leukemia accounting for 28% of all childhood cancers in children under the age of 15. Leukemia, however, is not a single class of cancer. There are numerous forms of leukemia each with its own distinct cause.  

In this episode, Tiffany Garbutt from The Scientist’s Creative Services team spoke with Charles Mullighan, member of the department of pathology and deputy director of the Comprehensive Cancer Center at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, about the search for the molecular drivers underlying lineage ambiguous leukemias, a diverse subclass of leukemias with unknown origins.

LabTalk is a special edition podcast produced by The Scientist Creative Services Team, where we explore topics at the leading edge of innovative research. This episode is brought to you by 10x Genomics, which builds solutions for interrogating biological systems at a resolution and scale that matches the complexity of biology. Their rapidly expanding suite of products, which includes instruments, consumables, and software, enables fundamental discoveries across multiple research areas, including cancer, immunology, and neuroscience.

Multispecific medicines that bind to and bring together effector and target molecules are leading the fourth wave of drug development. In this episode, Ray Deshaies speaks with Craig Crews, the John C. Malone Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and professor of chemistry and pharmacology at Yale University. Years ago, Craig and Ray collaborated on a project developing proteolysis targeting chimeras, or PROTACs, a form of multispecific medicine that can bind to targets once thought to be undruggable through the recruitment of an E3 ubiquitin ligase, leading to protein destruction. They take a deep dive into the history and function of PROTACs, and make bold predictions of the future of this medicine modality.

To dive further into this topic, please join Amgen scientists at the Undruggable Q&A webinar discussion on November 3, 2021. Register for this event here: Undruggable Q&A 1

Welcome to Undruggable, a special edition podcast series produced by The Scientist’s Creative Services Team. This series is brought to you by Amgen, a pioneer in the science of using living cells to make biologic medicines. They helped invent the processes and tools that built the global biotech industry, and have since reached millions of patients suffering from serious illnesses around the world with their medicines.

Beginning with the introduction of aspirin at the start of the 20th century, there have been three major waves of innovation in drug discovery. While breakthrough discoveries have been made, 85% of disease targets are still considered undruggable, which represents an ongoing barrier to discovering medicines for complex diseases like cancer and autoimmune conditions. Ray Deshaies, who has spent decades in academic research and is a senior vice president at Amgen, believes that the fourth wave of innovation is here, led by new types of multispecific medicines that will radically alter our concept of how drugs can work and pave the way for new solutions.

Welcome to Undruggable, a special edition podcast series produced by The Scientist’s Creative Services Team. This series is brought to you by Amgen, a pioneer in the science of using living cells to make biologic medicines. They helped invent the processes and tools that built the global biotech industry, and have since reached millions of patients suffering from serious illnesses around the world with their medicines.

Beginning with the introduction of aspirin at the start of the 20th century, there have been three major waves of innovation in drug discovery. While breakthrough discoveries have been made, 85% of disease targets are still considered undruggable, which represents an ongoing barrier to discovering medicines for complex diseases like cancer and autoimmune conditions. Ray Deshaies, who has spent decades in academic research and is a senior vice president at Amgen, believes that the fourth wave of innovation is here, led by new types of multispecific medicines that will radically alter our concept of how drugs can work and pave the way for new solutions.

We are in an exciting time for drug discovery and development. Once thought to be an insurmountable task, scientists are successfully tackling the problem of undruggable disease targets. In this episode, Ray Deshaies talks to Ryan Potts, executive director and head of Induced Proximity Platform at Amgen. They trace the history of modern drug design all the way up to today’s fourth wave, and discuss what makes a disease target undruggable.

To dive further into this topic, please join Amgen scientists at the Undruggable Q&A webinar discussion on November 3, 2021. Register for this event here: Undruggable Q&A 1

Human genetics has the power to transform the future of drug development, disease treatment, and the overall approach to healthcare. In this episode, we discuss current and future applications of -omics to clinical trials, disease risk assessment, and precision medicine with Amit Khera, a cardiologist and associate director of the Precision Medicine Unit in the Center for Genomics Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Khera pioneered the use of polygenic risk scores calculated from genome-wide associate studies as a way to quantify genetic risk. His research program uses genetic variation as a tool to uncover new biology and enable enhanced clinical care informed by inherited susceptibility.

DNA Unlocked is a special edition podcast series produced by The Scientist’s Creative services Team. This series is brought to you by Amgen, which is a pioneer in the science of using living cells to make biologic medicines. They helped invent the processes and tools that built the global biotech industry, and have since reached millions of patients suffering from serious illnesses around the world with their medicines.

Since the initial sequencing of the human genome almost twenty years ago, researchers have been enticed by an explosion of DNA data. These sequences hold the promise of understanding human biology, transforming drug research and development, and curing diseases. However, the quest to generate insights from human genetics and -omics research has been full of twists, turns, and roadblocks. In DNA UNLOCKED, Ray Deshaies, senior vice president of Global Research at Amgen, explores the ever-evolving perception of human biology and disease processes thanks to a growing mountain of genetics and omics data. Through discussions with colleagues and other leading research experts, Deshaies unpacks how drug developers decode human genetics to solve some of the most challenging diseases.