Leah Cowen - Targeting Antifungal Resistance
Science to Business Network (S2BN) Podcast
English - January 12, 2021 23:00 - 1 hour - 62.2 MBScience Business Careers science business innovation entrepreneurship commercialization Homepage Download Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Biography: Leah Cowen, PhD
Professor and Chair, Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto
Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Bright Angel Therapeutics
Dr. Leah Cowen obtained her BSc in Microbiology and Immunology at the University of British Columbia and pursued doctoral research with Jim Anderson and Linda Kohn at the University of Toronto focused on the genomic architecture of adaptation to antifungal drugs. As a postdoctoral fellow with Susan Lindquist at the Whitehead Institute, Dr. Cowen investigated how the molecular chaperone Hsp90 impacts on fungal evolution and phenotypic diversity. Since 2007, Dr. Cowen has been a Canada Research Chair in Microbial Genomics and Infectious Disease in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto. Her laboratory takes an interdisciplinary approach to understand what allows some microbes to exploit the host and cause disease, and to develop new strategies to treat life-threatening infectious disease. Dr. Cowen co-founded Bright Angel Therapeutics, a company that leverages state-of-the-art technologies for development of novel antifungal therapeutics.
About Bright Angel Therapeutics:
Bright Angel Therapeutics is a Toronto-based, pre-clinical company committed to developing new drugs to address the growing global public health crisis of antifungal resistance. The company's discovery efforts are focused on molecules that inhibit stress response pathways that are believed to be central to the emergence of fungal resistance. Bright Angel was co-founded by Schrödinger and is leveraging the Schrödinger computational platform to design potent and fungal-selective inhibitors. Other co-founders include Toronto Innovation Acceleration Partners (formerly MaRS Innovation), a nonprofit supporting the commercialization of research breakthroughs from Toronto's leading academic institutions; Dr. Leah Cowen, Professor and Chair, Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto, co-Director CIFAR Fungal Kingdom: Threats & Opportunities Program, and Chief Scientific Officer, Bright Angel Therapeutics; and company consultant Dr. Luke Whitesell.
Visit brightangeltherapeutics.com for more information.