Protein Misfolding Diseases

Rossen Donev received his PhD degree in 1999 from the Institute of Molecular Biology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He did postdoctoral training at Imperial Cancer Research Fund, UK (renamed after the merger with Cancer Research Campaign to Cancer Research UK, London Research Institute) and Cardiff University. In 2007 he was awarded a New Investigator Grant Award from the Medical Research Council (UK) to establish himself as an independent Principle Investigator. In 2010 Dr. Donev was appointed Senior Lecturer at Swansea University. In 2016 Dr. Donev joined MicroPharm Ltd (UK) where currently he is Head of Research. He has published more than 60 research papers, chaired scientific meetings and given invited plenary talks. Rossen Donev has consulted on projects related to development of treatments for neurodevelopmental disorders and cancer therapies. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Advances in Protein Chemistry and Structural Biology and on editorial board of several other journals. His research interests include signaling pathways involved in neuropsychiatric disorders and tumor escape from the immune system, and development of therapeutic strategies for their treatment. More recently he has focused on development of immunotherapeutics for non-systemic applications.

Ajaz A. Bhat is a Senior Staff Scientist at Sidra Medicine, Qatar. He earned his PhD in Vaccine Immunology from AIIMS, New Delhi, and completed his postdoctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA, where his research was focused on tight junction proteins in colorectal cancer and bile acid–induced regulation of APE1/Ref1 in esophageal cancer. His current research is on cancer genetics, drug discovery, obesity, and diabetes.