Chemical Biology – From Small Molecules to Systems Biology and Drug Design

Stuart L. Schreiber is the Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University (Boston). He is also a co-founder of the Broad Institute, a joint initiative of Harvard University and MIT. For his pioneering achievements in establishing chemical biology as a new field in chemistry, Professor Schreiber has received numerous awards, among them the ACS Awards in Synthetic Organic Chemistry (1994), and Bioorganic Chemistry (2000), and the Tetrahedron Prize for Creativity in Organic Chemistry (1997). Tarun Kapoor is the Head of the Laboratory of Chemistry and Cell Biology at Rockefeller University (New York). He joined the Rockefeller faculty in 2001 after a postdoctorate with Stuart Schreiber at Harvard University. Research in the Kapoor laboratory focuses on the discovery of small molecule probes for cell division using diversity-oriented synthesis. Gunther Wess is the Head of the GSF Institute for Health and Environment in Neuherberg (Germany). Before being appointed to that position, he was the Head of Research and Development Europe of the Sanofi-Aventis corporation. Under his leadership at Aventis, the principles of Chemical Biology have become indispensable for answering basic questions in early drug discovery.