WEHI Wednesday Seminar hosted by Professor John Silke
 

Professor James Vince
Laboratory Head – Inflammation division, WEHI

The fantastical Inhibitors of Apoptosis
 

Davis Auditorium

Join via SLIDO enter code #WEHIWednesday

Including Q&A session

Inhibitor of Apoptosis (IAP) proteins were first discovered in baculoviruses, which infect caterpillars. Their mammalian counterparts were reported 30 years ago by David Vaux’s laboratory at WEHI. Since then, IAPs have been targeted therapeutically using rationally designed small molecules to trigger apoptosis in cancer and infectious disease. Yet in hereditary disorders, mutations in IAP genes can cause a life-threatening cytokine storm syndrome or treatment-refractory inflammatory bowel disease. The fantastical biology of IAP proteins has carried my research into these seemingly distinct fields, which are united by the dysregulation of programmed cell death.

This seminar follows two such lines of work: the first investigates how cell death contributes to inflammatory bowel disease in humans, and the second introduces a new class of IAP-based biodegraders that eliminate multiple proteins at once for optimal anti-cancer responses.

All welcome!