Abstract
Dr. Holger Wesche is a Principal Scientist at Amgen Inc. in South San Francisco (formerly Tularik), where he has been working for the past 10 years. His group is involved in the identification and validation of novel targets for pharmaceutical intervention. Dr. Wesches lab also works on assay development for HTS and SAR support for development candidates. His research focus is the mechanism of signal transduction and gene regulation in inflammation and cancer. Dr. Wesche received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Immunology in 1997 from the University of Hannover, Germany. Dr. Shou-Hua (Josh) Xiao has worked in the biotech industry for about 10 years in drug discovery. He is currently Principal Scientist, leading the assay development and HTS group in the Lead Discovery Department of Amgen, San Francisco. His responsibility and experiences include assay development and high throughput screening for GPCRs, protein kinases and other classes of enzymes and mechanistic enzymology. His group has also set up high throughput eADME assays and hERG profiling. Previously in 2003, Dr. Xiao joined Tularik (acquired by Amgen in 2004) in similar role. Prior to joining Tularik, Dr. Xiao had worked at Millennium Pharmaceuticals for five years, also in Lead Discovery, where he and his group established a very effective substrate ID platform for novel protein kinase targets from functional genomics. Dr. Xiao obtained his Ph.D. degree in Biochemistry from Louisiana State University and conducted his postdoctoral research with Dr. James Manley at Columbia University, New York. Dr. Steve Young is an Executive Director at Amgen Inc. where he heads up the Lead Discovery organization. After working at the South San Francisco site for 5 years, he is currently based in Seattle where he is engaged in establishing an HTS laboratory at Amgens Washington facility. His research interests revolve around the application of high throughput technologies to Drug Discovery. In recent years, the work of his research team has increasingly expanded from an historic focus on High Throughput Screening to include the implementation of genomics based technologies in target discovery and validation. Dr. Young received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1994 from the University of Bristol, U.K. for research into Insulin Receptor Mediated Signal Transduction.