Jean Borges Bertoldo NSW State Cancer Conference 2023

Jean Borges Bertoldo

Originally from Brazil, I moved to Australia from Germany to join Children’s Cancer Institute in March 2022, having been appointed Team Leader in the newly established Chemical Biology and Target-Based Drug Design Group. I completed my PhD in Biochemistry at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. I have worked at both the University of Cambridge, UK, and the University of Lisbon, Portugal, developing new methods to chemically modify proteins to modulate their function. I then worked at the Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, where I developed a pioneering new drug for the treatment of ovarian cancer – a covalent inhibitor of an RNA-binding protein, which is the first of its kind. At Children’s Cancer Institute, I am working at the interface of chemistry, drug discovery and cancer biology with the main aim of designing new drugs for the treatment of childhood cancers such as neuroblastoma and paediatric diffuse midline gliomas. My team is applying a unique computational chemistry and chemical biology platform that I developed in Germany to streamline the drug discovery process, and is working closely with the Drug Discovery Centre and THerapeutic INnovations for Kids (THINK) to establish in silico (computer-based) drug design.