Steve Fesik

Cancer Drug Discovery Using Fragment-Based Approaches and Structure-Based Drug Design


I have just joined the faculty at Vanderbilt University and am in the process of building my group. The focus of our lab will be on cancer drug discovery using fragment-based approaches and structure-based drug design. Highly validated cancer targets will be chosen that should produce strong signals of anti-cancer activity when inhibited. A multidisciplinary approach will be used that involve molecular/cell biologists to clone, express, and purify proteins and perform primary and secondary biological assays, structural biologists (NMR, X-ray, molecular modeling) for fragment-based screening and structure-based drug design, medicinal chemists to design and synthesize small molecules, and pharmacologists to test the compounds in tumor models.

Lab Homepage