ACA SIG Officer Candidate 2021: Debanu Das

After attending numerous ACA meetings for the past 20 years starting from 2002 as an early graduate student, I am very excited to be considered for this position in the ACA Industrial SIG. My  interests lie in the application and development of high-throughput structural biology/protein X-ray crystallography to investigate proteins and their complexes with the ultimate goal of exploiting the knowledge outcomes in structure-based drug discovery. Following my graduate work on the crystal structure of the full-length murine reverse transcriptase-DNA complex (with Prof. Millie Georgiadis) at Rutgers-The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, I spent 11 years in the development and deployment of HT protein crystallography; including 3 years in postdoctoral training at the Berkeley Structural Genomics Center (with Prof. Sung-Hou Kim, University of California Berkeley & Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) and 8 years as Scientist at the Joint Center for Structural Genomics (headed by Prof. Ian A. Wilson at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla & Prof. Keith O. Hodgson at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory & Stanford University). In 2015, I co-founded Accelero Biostructures, Inc. focused on translating our HT protein X-ray crystallography expertise for speeding up structure- and fragment-based drug discovery for the discovery and development of novel therapeutics. In 2019, I co-founded XPose Therapeutics, Inc., aimed at developing novel medicines for challenging targets, leveraging fragment hits and crystal structures (from Accelero Biostructures platforms) to develop target-specific therapeutics. I have long been interested in extending the reach, connections and networks between academia and industry in translating the fruits of labor in crystallography methods development, deployment and training to practical applications in industrial crystallography, drug discovery and the structural biology workforce. My main goal with this SIG involvement would be to put into practice further exploring and enhancing such opportunities.