As part of Advancing Drug Discovery: A Webinar Series of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, a session on The Awesome Power of Multispecific Drugs will be held on Wednesday, September 18th, 2024. The 60-minute session will consist of a presentation from Dr. Raymond Deshaies, Senior Vice President of Global Research at Amgen, Inc, with time for a short question and answer session at the end. Dr. Deshaies will review the challenges and opportunities and describe approaches that Amgen and other leading innovators in the biopharmaceutical industry are taking to develop the next generation of multispecific small molecule and biologic medicines for the benefit of future patients.
Collectively, the biopharmaceutical industry has had an enormous impact on human health through the discovery and development of numerous safe and effective molecular medicines, including both small molecules and biologics. This success has, inevitably, raised the bar on expectations for future medicines. To thrive going forward, our industry will have to make medicines that are even safer and more effective than what came before. This is a tall order, given the relatively small number of high-conviction, accessible targets in most diseases. Nevertheless, opportunities abound, provided that we can surmount the key barriers that restrain many drug development efforts. These include overcoming biological redundancy, managing ontarget toxicity/therapeutic index, and conquering so-called undruggable targets. Multispecific medicines that either attack multiple targets simultaneously, localize the action of a drug, or link targets to powerful natural effectors offer a new approach to vanquish these perennial challenges.
Dr. Deshaies will review the challenges and opportunities and describe approaches that Amgen and other leading innovators in the biopharmaceutical industry are taking to develop the next generation of multispecific small molecule and biologic medicines for the benefit of future patients.
Prior to joining Amgen, Deshaies served as a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and an executive officer in Caltech’s Division of Biology and Biological Engineering. He was also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He has published over 150 papers on various subjects including discoveries of Sec61 translocon, cullin–RING ubiquitin ligases, and proteolysis-targeting chimeric molecules (Protacs).
In addition to his academic work, Deshaies co-founded Proteolix in 2003. In 2011, he cofounded Cleave Therapeutics.
Deshaies holds a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and National Academy of Sciences. In 2022, Fierce Pharma named Deshaies as one of the most influential people in biopharma. He received the 2023 Jacob and Louise Gabbay Award in Biotechnology and Medicine along with Yale University professor, Craig Crews, for their pioneering work on PROTACs, or proteolysis targeting chimeras.
Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
