Dr. Chaohong Sun

Dr. Chaohong Sun is a Senior Director and Senior Research Fellow in the Discovery Research organization at Abbvie, where she leads a core function that includes protein sciences, biophysics, different screening technologies (Fragments, HTS and DEL), centralized assay lab and structural biology to support Abbvie’s small molecule pipeline across therapeutic areas. In addition, she heads up a cross functional leadership team that is responsible for setting and executing hit generation and lead generation strategies for Abbvie early portfolio targets. She received her Ph.D. from Dartmouth College in biophysical chemistry and then joined Abbott as a postdoctoral research fellow to study structures and functions of proteins involved in apoptosis pathway before becoming a staff scientist. Chaohong is coauthor of over 60 peer reviewed scientific publications and patents.

Fragment-Based Discovery of Novel and Potent STING Agonist

STING plays an essential role in the innate immune system and has been an attractive therapeutic target for drug discovery. In this talk, I will describe our fragment effort using complimentary biophysical approaches to identify and characterize fragment hits, 2D NMR as one of the primary SAR assays and applying iterative structural based drug design to deliver novel and potent STING agonists with robust in vivo efficacy. I will also discuss some key takeaways and lessons learned from our FBLD practice over the years.