FOUNDERS
Charles Craik, Ph.D.
Charles Craik is a Professor in the Departments of Pharmaceutical
Chemistry, Cellular & Molecular Pharmacology and Biochemistry & Biophysics
at the University of California at San Francisco. He is also the
director of the Chemistry and
Chemical Biology Graduate Program. He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from
Columbia University in New York and carried out his postdoctoral research at
UCSF with Dr. William Rutter. He joined the UCSF faculty in 1985 and has published
over 200 research articles on various biochemical topics. He has co-authored
two books, and served on advisory panels for the National Institutes of Health,
the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences and the Department
of Energy. He has organized several international meetings on topics including
Protein Engineering, Drug Discovery, and The Biology of Proteolysis. The current
research in the Craik lab focuses on the chemical biology of proteolytic enzymes
and their natural inhibitors. A particular emphasis of his work is on identifying
the roles and regulating the activity of proteases associated with infectious
diseases, cancer and development. These studies are providing a better understanding
of both the chemical make-up and the biological importance of these critical
proteins.
Sandra Waugh Ruggles, Ph.D.
Dr. Waugh Ruggles brings to Catalyst strong experience in structural biology,
biochemistry and protease engineering. Sandra received her PhD in biophysics
at the University of California at San Francisco where she worked in the
laboratory of Dr. Charles Craik. Her graduate work focused on serine proteases
and the elements of their substrate recognition. She solved the first three
dimensional structure of granzyme B, a protease that regulates cell death
and further characterized many of the determinants of its specificity. Sandra
is also a past winner of the garage.com student business plan contest for
Quicksilver Genomics, and was an active participant in the formation of UCSF's "Idea
to IPO...and Beyond" class. In 2004, she was named to the MIT Technology
Review's TR100- a list of 100 top innovators under 35.
Christopher Thanos, Ph.D.
Dr. Thanos has a strong background in structural biology, protein engineering
and molecular recognition. Prior to Catalyst, he was a National Cancer Institute
Postdoctoral Fellow in Jim Wells' Lab at Sunesis Pharmaceuticals. There he
studied the affects of small molecules bound at protein hot spots. He solved
the atomic structure of a complex between a small molecule drug bound to
IL-2 and then used state of the art techniques in protein engineering to
dissect the biophysical nature of the complex. Interestingly, Dr. Thanos
discovered that IL-2 undergoes a dramatic conformational change from its
unbound state in order to bind the small molecule with high affinity, a phenomenon
not seen before in such an interaction. Before Sunesis, Chris was a National
Institutes of Health Chemistry/Biology Interface Predoctoral Fellow at UCLA.
Dr. Thanos characterized and solved the first atomic structures of SAM domains,
a fundamental building block conserved in over 100 critical developmental
and tumor forming proteins in humans.
