FBLD 2008 Speakers

James Wells, Ph.D.

Dr. Wells received a B.A. degree in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. degree in biochemistry from Washington State University. His postdoctoral studies were done at Stanford University Medical School, Department of Biochemistry. Dr. Wells was the founding member of the Protein Engineering Department at Genentech, Inc. where he worked for 16 years. His research focused on designing new functional properties into enzymes and hormones and developing new technologies for engineering proteins. In 1998, Dr. Wells founded Sunesis Pharmaceuticals where he served as President and Chief Scientific Officer and developed a novel fragment discovery technology known as disulfide trapping or Tethering. In 2005, Dr. Wells joined UCSF as the Harry W. and Diana Hind Distinguished Professor in Pharmaceutical Sciences. He is a joint Professor in the Departments of Cellular & Molecular Pharmacology, and Pharmaceutical Chemistry. At UCSF his areas of research interests are in the discovery and design of small molecules that trigger or modulate cellular processes in inflammation and cancer. He is interested in the allosteric "circuitry" in proteins and his laboratory is developing methods for tagging N-termini of proteins using engineered enzymes to follow proteolytic cascades especially those in apoptosis and cellular inflammation.