PhD student
Richard de Heiden
RESEARCH:
During my Master’s, I have developed an interest in understanding complex cellular processes and how we can use these to our advantage to develop novel therapies. Nowadays, I take advantage of my chemistry background towards the investigation and exploitation of E3 ligases.
During my PhD project, I will be working on the development of chemical tools to investigate the role of E3 ligases in the posttranslational modification of proteins. This not only includes ubiquitin-based probes, but also small molecule chemistry towards the development of PROTACs. Here, harnessing the E3 ligases to induce ubiquitination of a target protein, which ultimately leads to protein degradation.
CURRICULUM VITAE:
I studied Biopharmaceutical Sciences (BSc and MSc) at the Leiden University and obtained my Master’s degree in 2022. I did my first Master’s internship at the Leiden Academic Centre of Drug Research (LACDR), where I have worked on the design and synthesis of PROTACs for the degradation of chemokine receptors. During my second internship at the Leiden Institute of Chemistry (LIC), I have worked on the structure-based design and synthesis of activity-based probes (ABP) for the broad spectrum profiling of kinases in live cells. In November 2022 I started as a PhD student at the Cell and Chemical Biology (CCB) group under the supervision of Monique Mulder. Here I will be developing tools to investigate and harness E3 ligases for the development of novel therapies.
