Nathanael Gray, Ph.D., is the Krishnan-Shah Family Professor of Chemical and Systems Biology at Stanford, Co-Director of Cancer Drug Discovery, Co-Leader of the Cancer Therapeutics Research Program, Member of Chem-H, and Program Leader for Small Molecule Drug Discovery for the Innovative Medicines Accelerator (IMA). His research uses the tools of synthetic chemistry, protein biochemistry, and cancer biology to discover and validate new strategies for addressing anti-cancer targets. Nathanael’s research has had broad impact in the areas of kinase inhibitor and degrader design and in circumventing drug resistance. He generalized strategy for structure-based design of inhibitors that stabilize the inactive kinase conformations (type II) has been widely adopted by the research community and has had a significant impact on the development of numerous inhibitors of tyrosine kinases that are currently undergoing clinical development.
Nathanael’s contributions have been recognized through numerous awards including the National Science Foundation’s Career award in 2007, the Damon Runyon Foundation Innovator award in 2008, the American Association for Cancer Research for Team Science in 2010 and for Outstanding Achievement in 2011, the American Chemical Society award for Biological Chemistry in 2011, and the Nancy Lurie Marks endowed professorship in 2015 and the Paul Marks Prize in 2019.
Nathanael has also been involved in establishing new companies to advance projects from the lab into the commercial sector including: Gatekeeper (acquired), Petra, Syros (IPO), C4, Soltego, B2S, Allorion and Light Horse Therapeutics.