STEPHAN SCHURER, Ph.D.

With training in synthetic organic chemistry and over 15 years of research and management experience in industry and academia working on data standards, -integration, -modeling, scientific content and software development, cheminformatics and data science. Over the years, he has been involved in many small molecule probe and drug discovery projects and have been working in leadership positions in several national multi-site research consortia including the NIH Molecular Libraries Program, the Library of Integrated Network-based Cellular Signatures (LINCS), Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K), and the Illuminating the Druggable Genome (IDG) projects. At the Scripps Research Institute in Florida and the University of Miami,  he implemented operational informatics and research cheminformatics capabilities to support early stage drug discovery screening and optimization projects. Previous to working in academia, he directed groups of scientists to develop scientific content products, which are licensed to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Current research is focused on developing solutions to large-scale integration and modeling of systems biology ‘omics’ and drug protein interaction data to guide translation of disease models into novel functional small molecules and degraders with a particular focus on kinases, epigenetic, and RNA-binding proteins. The Schürer research group applies distributed and parallelized bio- and chemoinformatics tools and builds modeling pipelines to understand drug mechanism of action, –specificity, –promiscuity and –polypharmacology. To physically make and test the most promising small molecules, the group develops computationally-optimized synthetic routes and applies parallel synthesis technologies to synthesize small compound libraries. Together these capabilities enable efficient prioritization of novel cancer-relevant drug target hypotheses, identification of precision drug combinations, and the development of novel small molecule tool compounds as potential starting points for drug discovery projects.