Dr. Ania Fryszkowska Director of Biocatalysis in Process R&D Enabling Technologies, USA
Dr. Ania Fryszkowska the Director of Biocatalysis in Process R&D Enabling Technologies at Merck Sharp and Dohme, USA, where she is responsible for driving the application of enzymes to support the drug pipeline from discovery to commercial launch. Ania received her Ph. D. in organic synthesis from the Warsaw University of Technology and then went on to complete post-doctoral studies with Professor Nigel Scrutton at the University of Manchester working on flavin-dependent enzymes. After five successful years at Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories in the UK, she joined the Biocatalysis group at Merck in 2015, where she has played a pivotal role in driving innovation and expanding biocatalytic tools for process and medicinal chemistry. Ania co-led the development of the novel nine-enzyme cascade process for islatravir (Science, 2019), focusing on the sugar portion. She was a key contributor to inventing the suite of enzymatic methods for site-selective protein functionalization, utilized in the syntheses of insulin bioconjugates MK-5160 and MK-1029 (Science, just accepted). She authored over 25 publications and patents and her scientific contributions were recognized by many awards, including the ACS Young Investigator Award in 2020. Ania co-organized a series of Virtual Biocatalysis and Protein Engineering Meet-ups, which served as a platform for early-career scientists from industry and academia to share their science during the pandemic. Christian Hertweck Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology (HKI), Germany Christian Hertweck is the Head of Department Biomolecular Chemistry and Deputy Director at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology (HKI), and a Full Professor in the Faculty of Biological Sciences at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. His research focuses on the discovery of microbial natural products, elucidating and harnessing their biosynthesis (genome mining, pathway engineering), and studying the molecular basis of microbial interactions. In recognition of his group’s contribution to the field he was granted numerous awards including the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, and was elected as member of the German National Academy (Leopoldina) in 2015.
Timm Maier University of Basel, Switzerland
Timm Maier studied Biochemistry at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and completed his Doctorate in Structural Biology with Wolfram Saenger at Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany, in 2003. Timm Maier then moved as a Postdoc to the lab of Nenad Ban at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, where he was promoted to a team leader and lecturer position in 2006. In 2011, Timm Maier moved to the Biozentrum of the University of Basel as tenure track Assistant Professor and is Associate Professor of Structural Biology at Biozentrum since 2016. He and his team are best known for structural studies on giant multienzymes, in particular fatty acid and polyketide synthases, as well as on metabolic regulation and mTOR complexes.
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