Dr. Benjamin DiFrancesco

Ben completed his undergraduate work in Chemical Biology at McMaster University and spent time in Jim McNulty's lab synthesizing inhibitors of CYP19 (aromatase), a target of interest for the treatment of breast cancer. He then went to the University of Toronto for his doctoral work in Mark Nitz's lab, working on biosynthetic enzymes responsible for the production of PNAG, a ubiquitous bacterial biofilm-related polysaccharide. His work in the Nitz lab was highly multi-disciplinary: including organic synthesis, protein chemistry and enzymology. Upon completion of his degree, Ben started working at Cyclica as an Applied Scientist, responsible for the application of proprietary machine-learning techniques alongside more traditional CADD approaches to tackle challenging problems in drug discovery.