Dominic Hoepfner, Ph.D.

Scientist at Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research

Speaker

Dominic did his Ph.D. in the lab of Prof. Peter Philippsen at the Biozentrum in Basel, Switzerland followed by a postdoc with Prof. Henk Tabak at the University of Utrecht Netherlands, where he discovered the fundamental biogenesis pathway of peroxisomes that made it into the biology textbooks.

Dominic joined the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research in 2005 where he has been working in the field of chemical genetics to allow the identification of the mechanism of action of compounds. Together with his team, he leveraged genetically tractable systems to interrogate biological responses in a genome-wide fashion.

Over time, assays initially only possible in yeast cells were adapted to haploid mammalian stem cells and since three years the team is exclusively focusing on the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology to feed the drug discovery pipeline with novel targets.

In addition to his role at Novartis, he is teaching courses on chemical genetics and drug discovery at the University of Basel and the ESBS Strasbourg.