Prof. Benedikt Kessler, University of Oxford
Targeting p53 and Myc via deubiquitinases

Host: Kari Kopra (khkopr@utu.fi)

Coffee/tea and sandwiches served at 9:00

Benedikt Kessler graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH in Zurich, Switzerland in biochemistry in 1992. He received his PhD in immunology at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at the University of Lausanne in 1998. He then joined the laboratory of Hidde L. Ploegh at the Pathology Department at Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA, to study the role of proteolysis in antigen processing and presentation. After three years, he established a research platform in proteomics at Harvard Medical School. Currently he has nearly 300 publications and he is Professor of Biochemistry and Life Science Mass Spectrometry at the Target Discovery Institute (TDI), Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, UK. His laboratory is focused on ubiquitin and protease biology with a specialty in mass spectrometry, proteomics and recently in metabolomics. Expertise in his laboratory is also used to understand disease processes in translational research.

Selected recent publications
Nishi R, Wijnhoven PWG, Kimura Y, Matsui M, Konietzny R, Wu Q, Nakamura K, Blundell TL, Kessler BM. 2018. The deubiquitylating enzyme UCHL3 regulates Ku80 retention at sites of DNA damage. Sci Rep, 8 (1), pp. 17891.

Turnbull AP, Ioannidis S, Krajewski WW, Pinto-Fernandez A, Heride C, Martin ACL, Tonkin LM, Townsend EC, Buker SM, Lancia DR et al. 2017. Molecular basis of USP7 inhibition by selective small-molecule inhibitors. Nature, 550 (7677), pp. 481-486.

Pinto-Fernandez A, Kessler BM. 2016. DUBbing Cancer: Deubiquitylating Enzymes Involved in Epigenetics, DNA Damage and the Cell Cycle As Therapeutic Targets. Front Genet, 7 (JUL), pp. 133.