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Dr. Laura Itzhaki
Dr. Laura Itzhaki is a professor of Structural Pharmacology at the University of Cambridge, specifically she is based at the Newnham College, where she is a director of Studies in Biological Natural Sciences. Her research focus are proteins that play important roles in disease like cancer, the insights she and her research group obtains in the research help to develop strategies to target such conditions. The research group she is a leader of aims to develop proteins, peptidomimetics as well as other small molecules for therapeutic benefit.

Education
For her Ph.D. she worked along with Dr. Phil Evans, Department of Biochemistry, Cambridge, then for her postdoc she moved to the Department of Chemistry to work with Prof. Sir Alan Fersht.

Recent
Dr. Itzhaki proposed research for a funding scheme Pioneer Award which launched in 2015. Her project aims to develop drugs that will destroy molecules that play an important role in cancer development, meaning they can be made to order and target a large number of cancer-causing molecules instead of designing drugs that block the cancerous molecules from further action.

She is also a founder and CSO at PolyProx Therapeutics, a new Cambridge UK biotechnology business focused on the discovery and development of novel biopharmaceuticals to treat cancer, which recently raised £3.4 million seed capital. Polyprox will develop drugs that will cause the cancer tumour cells to degrade leading to the arrest of the tumour growth.

Recent Publications

 * 1) Exploring new strategies for grafting binding peptides onto protein loops using a consensus-designed tetratricopeptide repeat scaffold.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30746804

2. The tetratricopeptide-repeat motif is a versatile platform that enables diverse modes of molecular recognition.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30708253

3. Kinetic and thermodynamic effects of phosphorylation on p53 binding to MDM2

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30679555