Dr. Michelle R. Arkin University of California, San Francisco, USA

Biography

Dr. Michelle R. Arkin received her B.A. degree in chemistry from Bryn Mawr College and her Ph.D. in chemistry at Caltech with Dr. Jacqueline Barton. She then held a Daymon Runyon-Walter Winchell postdoctoral fellowship at Genentech. She was among the first scientists at Sunesis Pharmaceuticals where she helped to develop... read morefragment-based approaches for inhibiting protein-protein interactions and developed biophysical tools to characterize protein/small-molecule interactions. In 2005 she became the Associate Director of Cell Biology at Sunesis and led the translational science team for Voreloxin, an anti-cancer agent in phase 2 clinical trials. Since July 2007, Michelle has been the Associate Director of Biology at the Small Molecule Discovery Center and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UCSF. In this capacity, she directs the high-throughput screening facility and engages in grant-funded drug discovery research. Dr. Arkin's research interests are in seeking innovative approaches to tackle "undruggable" targets such as protein-protein interfaces and allosteric interactions.