Organic Chemistry Seminar

The Nomura Research Group is focused on redefining druggability using chemoproteomic platforms to innovative transformative medicines. One of the greatest challenges that we face in discovering new disease therapies is that most proteins are considered "undruggable," in that most proteins do not possess known binding pockets or "druggable hotspots" that small-molecules can bind to modulate protein function. Our research group addresses this challenge by advancing and applying chemoproteomic platforms to discover and pharmacologically target unique and novel druggable hotspots for disease therapy. We currently have three major research directions. Our first major focus is on developing chemoproteomics-enabled covalent ligand discovery approaches to rapidly discover small-molecule therapeutic leads that target unique and novel druggable hotspots for undruggable protein targets and incurable diseases. Our second research area focuses on covalent ligand discovery against druggable hotspots targeted by therapeutic natural products using chemoproteomic platforms to discover new therapeutic targets and synthetically tractable therapies for complex human diseases. Our third research area focuses on using chemoproteomics-enabled covalent ligand discovery platforms to expand the scope of targeted protein degradation to target and degrade undruggable proteins.