Crystallography matters ... more!

As part of the lecture series organized by the Campus of Caparica, Faculty of Sciences and Technology, Universidade Nova de Lisboa to celebrate the International Year of Crystallography, on October 8th, Dr João M. Dias is giving a lecture on Revolutionising GPCR crystallography and implications for structure-based drug discovery.

Doctor João M. Dias is a principal scientist at Heptares Therapeutics, leading the crystallographic work on the Muscarinic M1 receptor to target Alzheimer’s disease and pioneering a structure-based drug discovery approach to GPCRs.

João is an all-round hands-on crystallographer with experience from gene-to-structure with more than 15 years of experience, including 7 years of industrial experience.João did his Ph.D. in Structural Biology studying enzymes and metalloproteins at the New University of Lisbon with Prof. Maria João Romão and at the Max-Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Munich, working directly with Prof. Robert Huber (Nobel prize of chemistry in 1988 for the determination of the three dimensional structure of a photosynthetic reaction centre together with Hartmut Michel and Johann Deisenhofer). After his PhD, João did a postdoc at Merck-Serono, in Geneva working on the structural genomics pipeline, and solving the structure of complexes of human chemokines with novel chemokine binding proteins. Before joining Heptares, João was a research associate at Scripps, San Diego, where he determined the structure of a novel-neutralizing antibody in complex with the ebolavirus glycoprotein, elucidating the conformational epitope suitable as target for vaccines against ebolavirus.João has more than 25 papers in peer-reviewed journals and contributed to 17 structures deposited in the Protein Databank.