WEHI Wednesday Seminar hosted by Professor David Komander

Dr Bekky Feltham

Laboratory Head – Molecular Sciences division, WEHI

The Kingdom of E3s

Charting underexplored biology and new therapeutic opportunities

Davis Auditorium

Join via SLIDO enter code #WEHIWednesday

Including Q&A session

Dr Rebecca Feltham is a Laboratory Head in the Molecular Sciences division at WEHI and Co-Founder and Platforms Lead at Ternarx, WEHI’s targeted protein degradation spin-out. She trained with Prof John Silke at La Trobe and Prof Pascal Meier at the Institute of Cancer Research in London before returning to WEHI in 2015 as a postdoc with Prof James Vince and establishing her own lab in 2019. Her lab has two goals: discovering the E3 ligases that regulate inflammatory signalling, and building the platforms that turn E3s into therapies. The lab authored the E3-ome, developed NanoTACs, established the tag-degrader capability, uncovered new E3 biology and built TissueSAFE for tissue-selective degrader design.

Human cells encode 672 E3 ubiquitin ligases. Around 2% have been drugged. The rest are a landscape the field has barely walked therapeutically. The Feltham lab has been mapping this landscape and building the tools to work in it. They built the atlas (the E3-ome, the first gene-centric compendium of every human E3), the workshop (NanoTACs and the tag-degrader platform), and the compass (TissueSAFE, a multi-omics pipeline for choosing E3s that are safe to target in the right tissue). This seminar is a tour of that map. It visits E3 ligase regions the lab has explored together, shows what the atlas is now enabling, and closes on the next stretch of unmapped ground.

All welcome!