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Biomarker Discovery & Development | Webinars

A New Golden Age for Target Identification: Accessing the Novel Druggable Space with Discovery Proteomics

05 July 2024
On-demand webinar presented by Mo Jain, MD, PhD, Founder and CEO, Sapient and Jonathan Usuka, PhD, MBA Chief Business Officer, Sapient. Sponsored by Sapient.

Pharmaceutical drug development has traditionally focused on a limited number of well-characterized biological targets, with multiple companies developing drugs around the same proteins and pathways. Competitive crowding has created a race to compress time-to-market, prioritizing development execution over novel exploration.

Luckily, innovative new drug modalities are expanding the druggable space to disease-modifying proteins once considered too challenging to reach. This is ushering a new era for target identification, opening up new areas of the proteome for therapeutic targeting.

In this webinar, we will discuss how mass spectrometry-based discovery proteomics enables therapeutic developers to rapidly map this novel druggable space, measuring thousands of proteins and PTMs in the blood and tissue proteome with high analytical specificity. We will share how these analyses can lead developers to the most biologically interesting targets – not just the most popular – for novel discovery and greenfield development opportunities that can pave the way for new therapeutic breakthroughs.

You’ll learn about:

  • Trends that have led to intense competition around a small pool of protein targets
  • How innovative new drug modalities are significantly broadening the druggable space
  • Why mass spectrometry-based discovery proteomics is ideally suited for the new ‘golden era’ of target identification, supporting novel discovery of drug targets in the previously undruggable realms of the proteome

Speaker Biographies

Mo Jain, MD, PhD, Founder and CEO, Sapient

Dr. Jain is a physician-scientist with more than 20 years of expertise in physiology, biomedicine, engineering, computational biology, and mass spectrometry. Prior to founding Sapient, he formed and was director of Jain Laboratory at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). There he led a multi-disciplinary research team to develop next-generation rapid liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (rLC-MS) systems to probe dynamic biomarkers of health, disease, and drug response across population-scale human studies. Dr. Jain founded Sapient in 2021 as a spinout of Jain Laboratory to expand upon the mission of accelerating insight into human biology to advance precision drug development.

Dr. Jain obtained his MD and PhD from Boston University School of Medicine, and subsequently performed clinical residency and fellowship training in Internal Medicine, Cardiology, and Preventative Cardiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. His postdoctoral work was performed at the Broad Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital in the HHMI laboratory.


Jonathan Usuka, PhD, MBA, Chief Business Officer, Sapient

Dr. Usuka has more than 25 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry spanning both business and scientific leadership roles. He was previously Chief Strategy Officer at REALM IDx, where he led the creation and launch of integrated diagnostics in pharmaceutical services. Dr. Usuka was also a Senior Expert at McKinsey & Company, leading their Center for Analytics and Real-world Evidence. In that role he served pharmaceutical industry leaders in advancing their therapeutic pipelines through AI and supported M&A strategy for private equity investors in pharmaceutical services. He has additionally held senior positions at top pharmaceutical companies including as Director, R&D Informatics at Celgene and as Director, Global R&D Information at Roche. 

Dr. Usuka earned a PhD in Chemistry and was an NIH Fellow in Genetics at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, and holds an MBA in Finance from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and a BA from Princeton University.

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