Lucia Banci is Professor of Chemistry at the Magnetic Resonance Center and Department of Chemistry of the University of Florence. She has an extensive expertise and has provided original contributions and breakthroughs in Structural Biology and in biological NMR. The innovative in cell NMR approach developed by Lucia Banci and her group allows for the detection of human individual proteins in living human cells with atomic level resolution. She has developed an absolutely innovative approach to vaccine design, based on the knowledge of the structure of the pathogen antigens and of the interaction pattern with antibodies, to design structure-based vaccines.
Lucia Banci is one of the founders and present Director of the Center of Magnetic Resonance (CERM) of the University of Florence. She is the Head of the Italian Core Center of the ESFRI Research Infrastructure Instruct-ERIC, and a member of the Instruct-ERIC Executive Committee and of the Council.
Alessia Bacchi is Professor of Chemistry at the University of Parma. Her present main research interests are focused on crystal engineering of polymorphs, solvates, co-crystals, and of responsive hybrid organic/inorganic materials. Within this broad theme she developed crystalline molecular materials capable to reversibly capture and release volatile solvents in a solid/gas exchange, and proposed structural models to map the process of molecular recognition between the crystalline receptor and the volatile substrate. Recently she has focused on the design and control of crystal forms of molecular compounds, and on the stabilization inside crystalline structures (MOF and co-crystals) of liquid and volatile compounds related to human health, environment and nutrition.
Alessia Bacchi served as the President of the European Crystallographic Association (2015-2018). In 2015 she established the Museum of Crystallography at the University of Parma, of which she is currently the Director. She has been appointed Trustee of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Center in 2018.
Ester Boix is leading the research group on “Human host defense RNases” at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. Her research interests lay on the development of novel antibiotics based on the structure-functional knowledge of human secretory RNases, a family of small cytotoxic proteins expressed by epithelial and blood cells upon infection and contribute to maintain the body fluids’ sterility. They are activated upon a diversity of cellular stress injuries and mediate signaling processes, classified thereafter as alarmins. Interestingly, secreted RNases can shape the non-coding RNA population and participate thereby in the host innate immune response.
She is currently exploring the mechanism of action of human antimicrobial RNases against biofilms and macrophage intracellular bacteria and the structural recognition patterns for pathogen RNA targeting in the search for novel antibiotics to fight antimicrobial resistance.
Evripidis Gavathiotis is professor of biochemistry and of medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, New York. He is Co-Leader of the Cancer Therapeutics Program at Montefiore Einstein Cancer Center. His research focuses on mechanisms of protein interactions of the BCL-2 family proteins and other key proteins in cell death and cell survival pathways such as apoptosis, mitochondrial dynamics, selective autophagy and oncogenic signaling. His work in these pathways has pioneered mechanisms and signaling interactions, pharmacological strategies and first-in-class small molecules targeting challenging and “undruggable” targets. He has developed innovative approaches based on computational and biophysical methods as well as chemical strategies to enable the discovery and design of small molecules. His studies have led to several prototype therapeutics that are undergoing development towards IND application for oncology and aging-associated diseases. He leads an interdisciplinary group that has expertise in structural and chemical biology, medicinal chemistry, drug design, computational and experimental screening, biochemical and cell biology approaches and in vivo pharmacology.
Evripidis Gavathiotis has been honored with several prestigious awards and is co-founder of three biotechnology companies (BAKX Therapeutics, Selphagy Therapeutics, Stelexis Therapeutics).
Georgios A. Spyroulias is a professor at the Department of Pharmacy of the University of Patras since 2003. His research interests focus on the application of NMR spectroscopy in conformational analysis of biomolecules and metabolomics. His work includes the study of i)the structure-function relationship of RNA and DNA binding proteins having eukaryotic and viral origin, which are implicated in many steps of cellular cycle as transcriptional and translational regulators, ii)the Arkadia/RNF111 and Arkadia2C/RNF165 E3 ubiquitin ligases ubiquitination mechanisms. One of his research goals is to understand the structural, electronic and functional properties of heme proteins, involved in the NO-cGMP signaling pathway, by focusing on the gas-selectivity (NO, CO, O2) of human soluble guanylate cyclase (sGC) and bacterial analogues of the H-NOX domain of sGC.
Georgios Spyroulias is actively involved in the COVID19-NMR consortium (https://covid19-nmr.de/) investigating the structure determination of protein domain of COVID-19 non structural Protein3 (nsP3b and nsP3C), three Macro Domains of SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV, MERS in the apo and ADPr bound form and the three Sars Unique Domains (SUD-N, SUD-M, SUD-C).
Catherine Venien-Bryan is a professor at the Institue of Minerology, Material Physics and Cosmochemistry of the University of Sorbonne in Paris. Her research is focused on understanding the intimate relationship between ion channel structure and function. The objective is to understand the molecular mechanism at an atomic level. She is focusing on the inwardly-rectifying family of potassium channels or ‘Kir’ channels, more precisely Kirbac3.1 channel but also the eucaryotic Kir2.1 channel. She uses cryo-electron microscopy to determine the structure of human Kir2.1 channel at high-resolution. By combining structural, in silico, functional and biophysical data, she has have determined the impact of a mutation related to the genetic disease Andersen-Tawil syndrome on the structure and function of the human Kir2.1 channel.
Catherine Venien-Bryan also studies the DNA repair pathways which maintain genome integrity, and especially the FANCD2/FANCI complex which is involved at the DNA damage Fanconi Anemia repair pathway. She has identified the fork-like tower domain in the C-terminus of FANCD2 which is required for its complete functions in the DNA interstrand cross-link repair. Interestingly, several disease-causing mutations lie within this region, underscoring the importance of this domain.
Efstratios Stratikos is an Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Director of the Laboratory of Biochemistry at the Department of Chemistry of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece and also an adjunct researcher and group leader at the National Center for Scientific research "Demokritos'. His main research interests revolve around understanding complex biological systems at the molecular and atomic level. He studies the structure and function of protein biomolecules in an effort to understand their role, as well as the role of their disease-causing variants (such as rare mutations or single nucleotide polymorphisms), in the pathogenesis, predisposition and diagnosis of human disease. His aim is to validate and complement existing genetic or clinical association studies by providing mechanism-based insight that can establish the diagnostic and prognostic value of protein biomarkers for human diseases. He is also involved in rational-drug design efforts focused on the protein molecules he is currently investigating by providing structural and mechanistic insight as well as developing and performing customized in vitro and cell-based assays.
Cyril Bařinka is the head of Laboratory of Structural Biology at the Institute of Biotechnology in Vestec, Czech republic. His research interests focus on elucidating the structure-function relationship of several zinc-dependent hydrolases, including histone deacetylases (HDACs) and glutamate carboxypeptidase II (GCPII). The objective of his work is to understand the role of these enzyme in (patho)physiology with the focus on basic biochemical and structural studies.
Catherine Dejoie is a Beamline Scientist at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), where she develops x-ray diffraction techniques for the structural study of complex small molecules and inorganic materials.
Petra Lucacik is a Research Scientist in Dr. Martin Walsh's Group at Diamond Light Source. She is primarily involved in researching the disease-causing mechanisms of Gram negative bacteria such as Haemophillus influenzae, Yersinia pestis and pathogenic E. coli. In particular, she uses structural methods (crystallography and EM) to understand proteins involved in the transport of nutrients and other substances across the bacterial membrane. These processes are often essential for the bacteria to survive within the infected host, so she hopes to use this understanding to discover new antibiotic leads and/or vaccines.
Marco Mazzorana is a Beamline Scientist in the MX group of Diamond Light Source. His main interest is the development of complementary techniques for the elucidation of complex systems and the reaction mechanisms of enzymes. His main interests include i)the Sarco-Endoplasmic reticulum P-type Ca-ATPase (SERCA) and some of its functional partners by making use of CD, SAXS and X-ray crystallography to understand how the crosstalk among these proteins finely regulates the contraction of the cardiac muscle, ii)the MsbA and similar ABC-transporters which represent promising targets of antibiotics research and iii)the structural description of kinase-inhibitor complexes as well as protein phosphatases and their physiological modulators.
He is also working on developing novel crystal handling tools for the improvement of room temperature and humidity-controlled x-ray diffraction experiments.
Pietro Roversi is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Agricultural Biology and Biotechnology of the National Research Council of Milano, Italy. His research is focused on investigating the molecular mechanisms by which the eukaryotic cell either retains misfolded glycoproteins in the Endoplasmic Reticulum and/or degrades them. He develops and tests modulators of Endoplasmic Reticulum glycoprotein Quality Control (ERQC) and/or Endoplasmic Reticulum Associated Degradation (ERAD) as i) broad-spectrum rescuers of secretion of rare-disease associated responsive mutant glycoproteins; ii) broad spectrum anti-virals; iii) cancer chemotherapics. Using a combination of structural (Cryo-EM and X-ray crystallography) and functional analysis of recombinantly expressed purified ERQC / ERAD glycoproteins and their complexes with misfolded substrates, a range of biochemical and biological hypotheses are generated, which are then tested by in vitro and in cellula assays, and in vivo experiments using the plant as a model organism.
Paola Storici is leading the Protein Production Facility of the Elettra Synchrotron in Trieste, Italy. Her research projects involve studying proteins that are potential drug targets for the treatment of life-threatening diseases such as cancer and neurodegeneration. The protein families she is studying most are kinases and deubiquitinases and she investigates the mechanism of signal transduction and autophagy. Since the beginning of 2020 she has been involved in research on SARS-CoV2 for the discovery and development of drugs to cure Covid-19. Her team at Elettra has been focusing on the viral proteases Mpro and PLpro, dedicating to the protein production, crystallization, and x-ray structure determination in complex with small molecules derived from virtual and biochemical screenings.
Andrew Turnbull is Principal Scientist at Cancer Research Horizons in London, UK. He is an accomplished structural biologist with in-depth knowledge and expertise in biological sciences and extensive skills in all aspects of structural biology including structure-based drug design. He set up and leads the crystallography facility at Cancer Research UK Therapeutic Discovery Laboratories to aid drug discovery programmes. He also manages the FBDD initiative. Prior to that, he was a team leader in the crystallography group at the Oxford Structural Genomics Consortium where he determined more than 30 novel medically important human protein structures.