James Wells, PhD

Professor, Departments of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Cellular & Molecular Pharmacology at UCSF

Speaker

Jim Wells received his BA degrees in biochemistry and psychology from University of California, Berkeley, PhD in biochemistry from Washington State University from Ralph Yount, and Post-doc at Stanford University School of Medicine with George Stark. He began his independent research career in 1982 as a co-founding member of the Protein Engineering Department at Genentech where his group pioneered “gain-of-function engineering” of enzymes, hormones and antibodies. Several biologic products derived directly from these efforts, including engineered proteases, a therapeutic hGH antagonist, and VEGF blocking antibody for cancer.

In 1998, Dr Wells then co-founded Sunesis Pharmaceuticals where he was CSO, and president. At Sunesis, the group developed a novel technology, Tethering, for targeted small molecule drug discovery. The efforts of that group produced a drug for dry eye disease and new RAF inhibitor for cancer and several other compounds for clinical development in cancer.

In 2005 Wells joined the faculty of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Cellular & Molecular Pharmacology at UCSF. He founded the Small Molecule Discovery Center and served as Chair of Pharmaceutical Chemistry. The Wells Lab now investigates how cell surface proteomes change in health and disease by applying mass spectrometry and protein and antibody engineering, to understand and disrupt human-disease-associated signaling processes. He has co-founded half a dozen other companies, most recently EpiBiologics focused on developing extracellular degraders to remove disease causing proteins.

He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Inventors, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.