Dr. Butt has a PhD from the University of Glasgow, UK, and trained as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgetown University School of Medicine and a Staff Fellow at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, before joining SmithKline Beckman (now GSK) Pharmaceuticals in 1982. He worked in several therapeutic areas during his 14 years in the SmithKline organization, where he led one of the first ubiquitin drug discovery efforts in the industry. Dr. Butt has an appointment as Adjunct Professor in Biomedical Engineering at Drexel University, Philadelphia and is active in a number of national and regional biotechnology organizations. He founded LifeSensors Inc, a revenue positive biotech company, in 1996 and is a co-founder of Progenra, Inc.

Dr. Mattern has a PhD from Princeton University and received postdoctoral training as an NCI Fellow at the University of California San Francisco and subsequently worked at the NCI/NIH and at SB/GSK Pharmaceuticals in Oncology before joining Dr. Butt to establish Progenra Inc in November 2002. He was a member of the SB team that developed the anticancer drug Hycamtin/topotecan and, while at GSK, managed high throughput screening programs in several therapeutic areas. Dr. Mattern is a charter member of the DMP (drugs and molecular pharmacology) Study Section for the NCI and serves as an ad hoc reviewer on other study sections for academic and small business grants.

Dr. Murphy received a PhD. from UCLA and received an MRC Fellowship to train at the University of Cambridge. He has pursued careers in both academia and the biotechnology industry, having founded several companies. Dr. Murphy brings a unique perspective to the management team as he is an expert in both medicinal and computational chemistry and business administration. He joined Progenra subsequent to the company's establishment of a medicinal chemistry group, and his duties entail leadership of the internal chemistry effort as well as participation in Progenra's business activities.

Educated at the University of Pittsburgh (AB) and Penn State (MBA), Mr. Hixson brings to Progenra solid experience in pharmaceutical industry sales, business development and operational support. He has led sales, training and market analysis teams, overseen budgets, and negotiated formulary positions for various pharmaceutical organizations, and sales and marketing awards. Before joining Progenra he built a managed markets division for start-up dermatology company Onset Dermatologics, developing and implementing the company's strategic direction and guidance on formulary positioning for their product portfolio. At Progenra Mr. Hixson is responsible for leveraging the company's assets in discussions with mid- and large-sized pharmaceutical companies and directing business development, project management, and marketing operations.

David Counts joined Progenra Inc from ANGLE Technology Ventures and now serves as Senior Director of Business Development at Progenra. He is responsible for licensing and partnering Progenra compounds and ubiquitin technology platform. Dave has a B.S. from Tulane and Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the Medical College of Georgia, and trained as a post doctoral fellow at the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology. He was a faculty member at The University of Vermont before he joined a research team on skin aging at the Gillette Research Institute. David has held numerous senior positions at Lilly Research Laboratories, Marion Laboratories, Curative Technologies Inc. David has served as Associate Vice President for Assessment and Evaluation at BTG. He later joined the Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania in 2001 as Director of Life Sciences, with responsibility for the Nanotechnology Institute's corporate relations. David has negotiated and executed number of research contracts between large and small corporations.

Dr. Nicholson has a PhD from the University of Bristol, UK and received postdoctoral training at the University of California San Diego before becoming involved in ubiquitin-based assay development and high throughput screening at Nereus Pharmaceuticals. At Nereus he participated in the preclinical development of two compounds now progressing through clinical trials as anticancer agents. Dr Nicholson heads the drug discovery effort at Progenra, managing screening and lead optimization campaigns focused on ubiquitin pathway enzymes. He interacts with Progenra's collaborators, CROs and consultants in the preclinical development of Progenra's compound assets. In addition, Dr Nicholson frequently serves as an ad hoc reviewer for the NIH.

Dr Leach received a PhD from the University of Virginia and postdoctoral training at Harvard University in the laboratory of Dr Matthew Michael, where he developed an expertise in cellular mechanisms of ubiquitin family proteins. He is currently an Associate Director at Progenra, where he heads the Assay Development and Drug Metabolism groups and is also active in the generation of novel ubiquitin pathway reagents and other products. He served as a principal organizer of the 2010 Ubiquitin Conference on Drug Discovery and Diagnostics and has been an ad hoc reviewer for the NIH.

Dr. Weinstock pursued a distinguished and highly productive career as a director of medicinal chemistry at SmithKline & French (later SmithKline Beecham, and now GlaxoSmithKline) Pharmaceuticals. He directed a medicinal chemistry group that was responsible for the synthesis of several compounds that have become marketed drugs, including the antihypertensive agent Dyazide, the angiotensin II antagonist Tevetan, and the renal vasodilator Fenoldopam. Dr. Weinstock also played a key role in chemistry of additional compounds that were studied in the clinic for diuretic, hypotensive, and anti-inflammatory activity, and made substantial contributions to the chemistry of benzazepines, vulpinic acids, gold complexes, endothelin antagonists, NK3 antagonists, antibiotics, heterocycles, and combinatorial and array chemistry. In addition to his contributions to the synthesis of pharmaceuticals, Dr Weinstock was a leader and/or integral member of many preclinical development teams in the SmithKline organization, and is the author of >140 publications and 110 issued U.S.patents. Dr.Weinstock's contributions include three marketed drugs: Dyazide, corlopam/fenoldopam, eprosartan/tevetan.

Dr Kingsbury received a PhD in Organic Chemistry from Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, and completed postdoctoral training in Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. Dr. Kingsbury recently completed a distinguished career in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals (formerly SK&F Laboratories and SB Pharmaceuticals), where he held a number of leadership positions, retiring as a Director in 2006. Among Dr Kingsbury's many accomplishments is the synthesis of topotecan (HycamtinTM), a DNA topoisomerase I inhibitor that is now marketed for treatment of ovarian, lung, and other cancers. Dr Kingsbury is an author of numerous publications and holds 15 chemical patents.

Hematology/Oncology Division at Penn State Hershey Medical Center, Associate Director for Translational Research at Penn State Hershey Cancer Institute, Adjunct Professor of Medicine at University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. El-Deiry has received many honors and awards and is recognized by the Institute for Scientific Information as a Highly Cited Researcher in Molecular Biology and Genetics. He serves as Editor-in- Chief of the peer-reviewed medical journal Cancer Biology and Therapy and has been an active member of the American Association of Cancer Research's Science Policy and Legislative Affairs Committee. Dr. El-Deiry completed medical residency and fellowship training at Johns Hopkins prior to joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 1994. He has published more than 200 scientific manuscripts and reviews and has edited several books on cancer. He serves on numerous national science review panels, is a popular invited speaker, and has trained and mentored several dozen post-doctoral scientists and graduate students. As a practicing physician he specializes in oncology and as a researcher he seeks new treatments to fight aggressive resistant cancers. Dr. El-Deiry's lab recently described the caspase-targeting ubiquitin E3 ligase activity of proteins CARP1 and CARP2, and, using pioneering cell imaging techniques, identified small molecules that recapitulate p53 function in tumor cells.

Department of Biochemistry, Louisiana State University School of Medicine, New Orleans.
Dr. Haas is a recognized authority on the biochemistry and enzymology of ubiquitin pathway enzymes. He earned a PhD degree in Biochemistry from Northwestern University and received training as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Irwin Rose, one of three scientists awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery and elaboration of the ubiquitin pathway. Dr Haas published the first biochemical kinetics studies of the three enzymes (E1, E2, and E3) responsible for attaching ubiquitin to its target protein, and has long been regarded as a pioneer in the field of ubiquitin biochemistry. Dr Haas' lab recently identified a second constitutive cell system that is parallel but distinct from ubiquitin in which the 15 kDa interferon-like protein ISG15/UCRP is conjugated to a smaller subset of intracellular targets. ISG15 is a member of a small group of function-specific ubiquitin-like proteins that includes SUMO-1 and Nedd8. The conjugation of ISG15 to intracellular targets functions to regulate protein-protein interactions, in one instance acting in trans to mediate association of the target with intermediate filament.

Department of Molecular Biology and Biophysics, Yale University.
Dr. Hochstrasser has a PhD from the University of California, San Francisco and received postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the laboratory of Dr Alex Varshavsky, one of the pioneers in the field of ubiquitin research, and the developer of the "N-end rule" of protein degradation in cells. Dr Hochstrasser is one of several outstanding young scientists mentored by Prof. Varshavsky who are now leaders in today's rapidly growing ubiquitin field. He is well known as an expert in (1) protein turnover occurring in cells via the ubiquitin-proteasome system; and (2) the function and dynamics of protein modification by other proteins. Using yeast genetics and cellular biology/biochemistry tools, he has contributed much toward current knowledge of protein turnover and modification by ubiquitin and "ubiquitin-like proteins", describing, for example, the SUMO proteases of yeast (Ulp1,2). Dr Hochstrasser is the author of numerous articles, including seminal research papers as well as extensive reviews of the field, and his views on current developments in ubiquitin related research appear regularly as commentaries in Nature and Science.

Director of the Graduate Division of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, School of Medicine, Emory University.
Dr Wilkinson, a world renowned biochemist and enzymologist, holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan, and, like Dr Haas, trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in the laboratory of 2004 Nobel Laureate Dr. Irwin Rose at Fox Chase Cancer Center, Philadelphia. Dr. Wilkinson was invited as an honorary guest to the Nobel ceremonies held in Stockholm on December 10, 2004. His Nobel essay, entitled "Ubiquitin: A Nobel Protein," appears in the December 17 issue of the journal Cell. It traces the history of the groundbreaking research on ubiquitin over the past 25 years. Dr Wilkinson's own contributiuons to the ubiquitin field are many and span several decades. He discovered UCHL1, the first ubiquitin isopeptidase to be described, and showed that it was a target of therapeutic interest. He was, thus, one of the first to recognize the therapeutic importance of this class of enzyme. Dr. Wilkinson's laboratory has been a pioneer in the development of assays for isopeptidases that work on the ubiquitin family of proteins.

Dr. Weinstock pursued a distinguished and highly productive career as a director of medicinal chemistry at SmithKline & French (later SmithKline Beecham, and now GlaxoSmithKline) Pharmaceuticals. He directed a medicinal chemistry group that was responsible for the synthesis of several compounds that have become marketed drugs, including the antihypertensive agent Dyazide, the angiotensin II antagonist Tevetan, and the renal vasodilator Fenoldopam. Dr. Weinstock also played a key role in chemistry of additional compounds that were studied in the clinic for diuretic, hypotensive, and anti-inflammatory activity, and made substantial contributions to the chemistry of benzazepines, vulpinic acids, gold complexes, endothelin antagonists, NK3 antagonists, antibiotics, heterocycles, and combinatorial and array chemistry. In addition to his contributions to the synthesis of pharmaceuticals, Dr Weinstock was a leader and/or integral member of many preclinical development teams in the SmithKline organization, and is the author of >140 publications and 110 issued U.S.patents. Dr.Weinstock's contributions include three marketed drugs: Dyazide, corlopam/fenoldopam, eprosartan/tevetan.

Dr Kingsbury received a PhD in Organic Chemistry from Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, and completed postdoctoral training in Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. Dr. Kingsbury recently completed a distinguished career in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals (formerly SK&F Laboratories and SB Pharmaceuticals), where he held a number of leadership positions, retiring as a Director in 2006.
Among Dr Kingsbury's many accomplishments is the synthesis of topotecan (HycamtinTM), a DNA topoisomerase I inhibitor that is now marketed for treatment of ovarian, lung, and other cancers. Dr Kingsbury is an author of numerous publications and holds 15 chemical patents.