Professor Christopher Parker
Abide-Vividion Chair of Chemistry & Chemical Biology
Professor, Department of Chemistry
The Scripps Research Institute
biography
Chris is the Abide-Vividion Chair of Chemistry & Chemical Biology and Professor of Chemistry at Scripps Research. He earned his B.Sc. in Chemistry from Case Western Reserve University, and his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Yale University, under the supervision of David A. Spiegel and carried out postdoctoral studies under the supervision of Ben Cravatt as a fellow of the American Cancer Society at Scripps Research. Chris started his independent lab at Scripps in August 2018 and was promoted to full Professor with tenure in 2024. Among his recognitions, Chris is recipient of the CDRMP New Investigator Idea Development Award from the DoD, the Exploratory Cell Network Award from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, ACS Chemical Biology Early Career Award, and is founder of Belharra Therapeutics.
The Parker Lab develops chemistry-centric strategies to investigate human biology in therapeutic contexts. Specifically, we develop and deploy chemical proteomic strategies to broadly map proteins that are accessible to small molecules directly in cells, and advance this information into useful chemical probes for targets that play critical roles in human health and disease.
Title
Expanding the Chemical Tractability of Human Proteome
abstract
Chemical probes provide powerful tools to directly interrogate protein function and disease biology while also serving as valuable starting points for therapeutic discovery. However, the vast majority of proteins in the human proteome remain without small-molecule ligands, limiting our ability to study and pharmacologically modulate their functions. More fundamentally, the extent—and potential limits—of protein ligandability across native proteomes remains largely unknown. In this seminar, I will describe our laboratory’s development of photoaffinity-based chemical proteomic platforms that systematically map ligandable proteins directly in living cells. I will highlight how these approaches have enabled the discovery of chemical probes that illuminate mechanisms of innate immunity and inflammatory signaling, while more broadly revealing new opportunities to pharmacologically modulate proteins that have historically been considered intractable.