Matthew Bogyo, PhD. Stanford University School of Medicine, Department of Pathology
Expertise: Chemical tools to image, inhibit and study hydrolases involved in cancer and infectious diseases
About the lecture: Hydrolases are enzymes (i.e. proteases, esterases, lipases) that often play pathogenic roles in many common human diseases such as cancer, asthma, arthritis, atherosclerosis and infection by pathogens. Therefore, tools that allow dynamic monitoring of their activity can be used as diagnostic agents, as imaging contrast agents and for the identification of novel enzymes as drug leads.
In this presentation, I will describe our efforts to design and build small molecule probes that can be used to identify, inhibit and image various hydrolase targets in models of cancer and infectious disease. This will include recent advances in protease activated fluorescent probes for real-time visualization of tumors during surgery as well our efforts to identify several new classes of serine hydrolases in pathogenic and commensal bacteria. We believe many of these enzymes will represent valuable imaging and therapy targets that can be used to visualize and disrupt various aspects of colonization and community formation inside a host.
Host is Ulrika Westerlind