Congratulations to Rafal Wiewiora on receiving a Cancer Research Horizon Award!

Rafal Wiewiora, a graduate student in the Tri-Institutional Program in Chemical Biology, has been awarded a DoD Peer Reviewed Cancer Research Horizon Award.  This two-year grant supports exceptional junior-level scientists pursuing research in cancer with the guidance of a faculty mentor. Rafal’s project investigates the conformational heterogeneity of histone methyltransferases using molecular dynamics simulations on the Folding@home platform, a worldwide distributed computing project where hundreds of thousands of people around the world contribute their computing power toward the understanding of cancer targets. These models of conformational dynamics will be vital in aiding the in silico design of selective chemical probes to understand the roles that these methyltransferases play in cancer, as well as to develop new strategies to inhibit them. A native of Poland, Rafal received his MChem degree from the University of Oxford. 

Combined computational and experimental approach to discovering selective inhibitors of EZH2 and SETDB1 that exploit differences in conformational reorganization energies to achieve selectivity.