Dr. Haruaki Kurasaki, PhD

Director, Medicinal Chemistry at PeptiDream

Speaker

Dr. Haruaki Kurasaki is currently Director at PeptiDream Inc., a publicly traded Biopharmaceutical Company developing peptide-based therapeutics based in Japan. At PeptiDream, Dr. Kurasaki belongs to the Medicinal Chemistry Group as Director and leads various external collaboration projects related to development of peptides and PDC (Peptide-drug conjugates) the as well as the development of In-house technologies. Especially, Dr. Kurasaki has mainly contributed to the discovery and development of two clinical peptides recently: PA-001 for the treatment of COVID-19 and AZP-3813 (ALXN2420) as a GhR antagonist for the treatment of acromegaly. Prior to joining PeptiDream in 2016, Dr. Kurasaki worked at Kyorin Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. and belonged to synthetic research department as medicinal chemist and focused on antibacterial agents, natural products, inflammatory and respiratory diseases. Dr. Kurasaki specializes in small molecule and peptide-based drug discovery and is well-versed in a wide range of organic chemistry.