Monday, 7 July 2025 4:00pm – 5:00pm

This seminar will be delivered in Chemistry Lecture Theatre 4

Speaker: Pau Creixell

Host: Prof. Richard Payne

Title: Uncovering new biology of cancer proteins with systems biochemistry

Abstract
In the first part of my talk, I will discuss our lab efforts to elucidate the function of protein tyrosine kinases using systems biochemistry, and how we are challenging existing dogmas about the cancer promoting and suppressive function of the downstream programs that they engage. In the second part of my talk, I will discuss new technologies that we are developing and using to screen, identify, and characterize “superbinding” peptides as well as uncover molecular determinants of epistasis.

Bio
Pau studied Human Biology at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, before moving to Oxford, London and the Technical University of Denmark where he obtained his PhD in Computational Biology. He then received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation to pursue his postdoctoral studies at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. After securing a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence award from NIH/NCI, he established his lab at the University of Cambridge – CRUK Cambridge Institute in 2020. His lab integrates computational and experimental systems biochemistry approaches to study how proteins selectively recognize their substrates, how this process is perturbed in cancer and how it can be hijacked to find highly selective and mutant-specific drugs to overcome drug resistance.