Progress Towards Host-Directed Anti-Infective Agents
Fri, 4 December, 2020
2:00pm
Jason Sello, Professor, Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, UC San Francisco
The Department of Chemistry Presents, via Webinar: Progress Towards Host-Directed Anti-Infective Agents, Jason Sello, Professor, Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, UC San Francisco
Sedatives and anesthetics are essential medicines. Interestingly, many drugs administered by anesthesiologists to generate sedated and anesthetized states in patients are used without a precise understanding of their mechanisms. The ambiguities about these important medicines make them very compelling subjects for research. This seminar will outline how the discovery of sedatives and anesthetics can be accelerated using automated chemical synthesis, high-throughput screening, and behavioral profiling in zebrafish.
BIO
Jason K. Sello is a full professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Prior to his appointment at UCSF, Prof. Sello was a professor in the department of chemistry at Brown University. Before his first faculty appointment, he investigated RNA processing in Streptomyces bacteria using genetic tools as a visiting scientist at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, England and studied enzymes catalyzing antibiotic biosynthesis as a post-doctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School in the laboratories of Prof. Christopher T. Walsh. He earned a Ph.D. in biophysics from Harvard University in 2002 for work in diversity-oriented chemical synthesis under the supervision of Prof. Stuart L. Schreiber and a B.S. in biology, magna cum laude, from Morehouse College in 1997. In his independent career, Prof. Sello has been synergistically using experimental methods from chemistry, biophysics, biochemistry, and genetics to study biological phenomena and to develop new therapeutics for infections, cancer, and neurological disorders. He has also worked on technologies for the conversion of plant biomass into commodity chemicals. Prof. Sello’s findings have been reported in more than fifty journal articles and have led to five issued patents. He has also presented his findings in more than seventy invited lectures at colleges and universities, companies, and conferences around the world. He serves on the anti-microbial resistance and drug discovery study section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and is a founding co-editor of “Synthetic and Systems Biology”. He has been the recipient of several awards, including career awards from the Burroughs Welcome Fund and the National Science Foundation. In 2013, Prof. Sello was recognized with a year-long appointment at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor of Biology. He was the Lloyd Ferguson Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry at Cal State University, Los Angeles in 2018.
https://pharmacy.ucsf.edu/jason-sello