Speakers

David Virshup is a Professor at both Duke-NUS Medical School and Duke University. He got interested in CK1 over 30 years ago, when, as a new assistant professor at the University of Utah, his lab functionally purified CK1 as a kinase inhibitor of large T antigen in DNA replication. In an effort to get cDNAs for the whole CK1 family, long before the era of Addgene, his lab accidently cloned a new CK1, CK1ε. He was thrilled when it turned out CK1 family members including CK1ε were both regulators of circadian rhythms and of Wnt signaling. Virshup moved to Singapore in 2007 to establish the Program in Cancer and Stem Cell Biology at the Duke-NUS Medical School and has continued to study how CK1 isoforms are regulated and how they control circadian rhythms and cellular signaling.

Volker Dötsch is Professor of Biophysical Chemistry at Goethe University and a member of the Magnetic Resonance Center Frankfurt. His research interest is the structural and functional characterization of members of the p53 protein family, in particular p63 and its involvement in genetic quality control in germ cells. Different members of the CK1 kinase family play important roles in the regulation of the activity of p63 and investigating this CK1-based regulation is a research focus of the lab.

Kathy Gould is a Professor in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Her lab studies the coordination of cytokinesis with chromosome segregation using fission yeast as their primary model organism. One mechanism that delays cell division when the mitotic spindle is disrupted involves CK1 enzymes functioning at spindle poles. Her lab studies how CK1 delays cell division and what, in turn, modulates their protein kinase activity in this checkpoint pathway.

Carrie Partch is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California Santa Cruz and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her lab studies biological timekeeping with a focus on circadian rhythms, using biochemistry and structural biology to explore the mechanisms of clock proteins including CK1.

Yinon Ben-Neriah, MD-PhD, is a professor of immunology and cancer research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Fellow of the European Academy of Cancer Sciences, an EMBO member, and Adjunct Professor in Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His achievements include determining the structure and function of the CML oncoprotein P210^Bcr-Abl and developing prototype leukemia inhibitors targeting Bcr-Abl; deciphering key components in the NF-κB, p53 and Wnt signaling pathway, including CK1α; identifying NF-κB as the first molecular link between inflammation and cancer and developing a new class small molecule transcription inhibitor with profound therapeutic effects in AML.

David Strutt is Professor of Developmental Genetics and a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow at the University of Sheffield, UK. His lab works on planar polarity (also known as planar cell polarity [PCP]), investigating how cells adopt coordinated polarity in the plane of epithelial tissues and how this affects tissue morphogenesis. Work from his group has shown that function of the "core" planar polarity pathway, a branch of non-canonical Wnt signalling, is modulated by CK1 activity. Ongoing work seeks to understand the molecular and cellular basis of planar polarity and the role of CK1.

Professor Stefan Knapp is a structural biologist and medicial chemist at Goethe University Frankfurt and the CSO of the Frankfurt node of the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC). He specializes in elucidating protein kinase structure and function using chemical probes, including CK1 family members, to understand their regulatory mechanisms. His research employs crystallography and biochemical assays to explore kinase conformational dynamics, substrate specificity, and inhibition strategies. Knapp’s work has been instrumental in designing selective CK1 inhibitors for potential therapeutic applications.

Vítězslav Bryja is a professor and head of the Department of Experimental Biology, Faculty of Science, Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. His lab is focused on the regulation of Wnt signaling and the role of CK1 in this process. Throughout his career he has been working with various biological models and analytic techniques, including cell-based techniques, mouse models and proteomics. He is actively trying to push the results of the basic research to applications – with Prof. Kamil Paruch he is as a co-founder of CasInvent Pharma a.s., a spin-off company, which aims to harness benefits of CK1 inhibition for therapy of human pathologies.

Pascal Marchand is a full Professor of Organic Chemistry in the School of Pharmacy, University of Nantes, France. He is currently deputy director of the UR 1155 – IICiMed team (January 2017) and head of the Medicinal Chemistry department. In December 2022, he was elected Vice-Dean for Research at the School of Pharmacy – Nantes Université.
His main research field is focused on the design, synthesis and biological evaluation of heterocyclic compounds for therapeutic purposes (mycology and parasitology) by targeting kinase-signalling pathways. He managed various international collaborative projects (CAPES-COFECUB Brazil, PHC Ulysses Ireland, CONACyT Mexico, University of Toronto Canada, Ege University, Izmir & Izmir Katip Celebi University Turkey, & Assane Seck University of Ziguinchor Senegal). He was President (2017-2024) of the European research network (GP₂A: Group for the Promotion of Pharmaceutical Chemistry in Academia) and he is a board member of the French Medicinal Chemistry Society (SCT, January 2019).

Gopal Sapkota is a Professor of Disease Signalling at the Medical Research Council Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit at University of Dundee. His research primarily focusses on understanding the molecular regulation of the CK1 family of protein kinases, which control a plethora of biological processes and are implicated in many human diseases. His research has uncovered the eight members of the FAM83 family of proteins as scaffold anchors of CK1 isoforms that, through their conserved DUF1669 domain, interact with and dictate the subcellular distribution and biology of specific CK1 isoforms. For example, FAM83F and FAM83G activate WNT signalling through interaction with CK1α and the loss of FAM83G-CK1α interaction and WNT signalling underpins the pathogenesis of a skin disorder termed Palmoplantar Keratoderma caused by missense mutations in FAM83G. Similarly, FAM83D delivers CK1α to the mitotic spindle to ensure proper spindle positioning and timely cell division. His current research aims to establish the molecular basis of FAM83-CK1 interaction and determine how specific FAM83 proteins deliver CK1 activity to unique substrates to control CK1 biology and diseases.

Uwe Knippschild studied biology at the University of Cologne (Germany). He received his Ph.D. in protein phosphorylation at the University of Ulm in 1992. He then worked on protein phosphorylation at the Heinrich-Pette-Institute in Hamburg (1992-1995 and 1998-2002) and from 1995-1997 at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee (GB). In 2002 his research group moved to the Clinic of General and Visceral Surgery at Ulm University, where he is Professor since 2008. His research interests are now mainly focused on the characterization of the regulation and functions of members of the CK1 family, and the identification and validation of CK1 isoform-specific small molecule inhibitors in vitro, cell culture, and animal models.

Dr. Najma Rachidi is a research scientist and the head of the Signaling and Host-Parasite Interactions unit at the Institut Pasteur. Her research focuses on understanding how Leishmania, an intracellular parasite, evades immune defenses of the macrophage to ensure its survival. Dr. Rachidi and her team investigate secreted Leishmania proteins, which act in trans to modulate host cell signaling pathways, with a particular emphasis on Leishmania CK1.2. By elucidating the molecular mechanisms that allow Leishmania CK1.2 to manipulate host pathways, through interactions and/or phosphorylation of host proteins, her research aims to develop novel host-directed therapeutic strategies against leishmaniasis, a devastating parasitic disease.

Kostas Tripsianes is a biochemist by training who is hunting down a different kind of shape-shifting entity in search of answers about the inner workings of Wnt signaling: intrinsically disordered proteins. He is particularly interested in the “dark matter of the phosphoproteome”, a term coined to describe the multi-site phosphorylation of target proteins by CK1 and other kinases. With particular emphasis on NMR and strong collaborations in place, Tripsianes group at CEITEC-MU explores and synthesizes ideas and techniques from fields as diverse as cell and structural biology, biophysics, and computer science to gain a greater understanding of the molecular mechanisms, prevalence, and function of multi-site phosphorylation in Wnt signaling and other biological processes.

Andrea Venerando is Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Udine. He was trained at the Phosphorylation Unit headed by Professor Pinna in Padova, where he obtained his PhD in Biochemistry and Biophysics. His research focuses on the study of the molecular and cellular mechanisms that regulate signaling by altering protein kinases, in particular acidophilic kinases. His research also involves the identification, development and characterization of new compounds that modulate protein kinases as pharmacological targets. Over the last decade, he has directed his research towards cystic fibrosis and the deregulation of protein kinases in this pathology.

Lorenzo A. Pinna is Professor Emeritus at the University of Padova. He was a pioneer in the field of protein phosphorylation (first paper published in 1963) and later became an expert in phosphorylation-mediated signal transduction, with particular reference to the molecular enzymology of oncogenic protein kinases and the development of kinase inhibitors with anticancer potential. He made decisive contributions to the definition of the consensus sequences recognized by individual protein kinases, to the understanding of the biological functions of acidophilic protein kinases and to the identification of the atypical kinase responsible for the generation of the phospho-secretome.