April 16, 2024
Daniel Nomura to present Chemistry Seminar
Daniel Nomura, professor of chemical biology at UC Berkeley, will be the speaker for this week's Chemistry Seminar. Nomura will present "Reimagining Druggability using Chemoproteomic Platforms" at 1:05 p.m. Thursday, April 18, in Room 4 of King Hall.
The Nomura Research Group is focused on reimagining druggability using chemoproteomic platforms to develop transformative medicines. One of the greatest challenges that we face in discovering new disease therapies is that most proteins are considered "undruggable," in that most proteins do not possess known binding pockets or "ligandable hotspots" that small-molecules can bind to modulate protein function. The research group addresses this challenge by advancing and applying chemoproteomic platforms to discover and pharmacologically target unique and novel ligandable hotspots for disease therapy. Read more about the research group.
Nomura is a professor of chemical biology and molecular therapeutics in the department of chemistry and the department of molecular and cell biology in the Division of Molecular Therapeutics and an investigator at the Innovative Genomics Institute. He is also the co-director of the Molecular Therapeutics Initiative at UC Berkeley. He is an adjunct professor in the department of pharmaceutical chemistry at UCSF. Since 2017, he has been the director of the Novartis-Berkeley Translational Chemical Biology Institute focused on using chemoproteomic platforms to tackle the undruggable proteome.
He is co-founder of Frontier Medicines, a start-up company focused on using chemoproteomics and machine learning approaches to tackle the undruggable proteome. He is also the founder of Vicinitas Therapeutics based on his group’s discovery of the Deubiquitinase Targeting Chimera platform for targeted protein stabilization. He is on the Scientific Advisory Boards for Frontier Medicines, Vicinitas Therapeutics, Photys Therapeutics, Apertor Pharma, Ecto Therapeutics, Oerth Bio and Deciphera Pharmaceuticals.
Nomura is also on the scientific advisory boards of The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research and the MD Anderson Cancer Center. He is also an investment advisory partner at a16z Bio+Health, an investment advisory board member at Droia Ventures, and an iPartner with The Column Group.
He earned his bachelor's degree in molecular and cell biology in 2003 and doctorate in molecular toxicology in 2008 at UC Berkeley with Professor John Casida and was a postdoctoral fellow at Scripps Research with Professor Benjamin F. Cravatt before returning to Berkeley as a faculty member in 2011.
Among his honors include the National Cancer Institute Outstanding Investigator Award, Searle Scholar and the Mark Foundation for Cancer Research ASPIRE award.