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2009 © Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland FIMM

Group Wennerberg

Krister Wennerberg received both his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Uppsala University in Sweden. His graduate studies were done in Staffan Johansson's group where he studied β1 integrins and the cytoplasmic domain of the β1 subunit. In 2000 he began his postdoc joint between the laboratories of Keith Burridge and Channing Der at the University of North Carolina working on the regulation of small G-proteins and developed activity-based functional proteomics approaches to study these events. In 2004, he took a research and development scientist position at Cytoskeleton, Inc a small biotech company in Denver, CO, USA. In 2006 he moved to a group leader position at the Drug Discovery Division of Southern Research Institute, a not-for-profit research institute in Birmingham, AL, USA, where he managed an internal drug discovery program and lead an assay development group. In this role, he was involved in most aspects of early drug discovery, from target identification and -validation to assay development, high throughput screening, hit-to-lead- and lead optimization.

The Wennerberg lab at FIMM uses chemical biology approaches to gain fundamental novel understanding of cancers and other major human diseases. The overall goal is to generate novel biological information and molecular probes that ultimately can be used to develop new treatments. The current projects in the lab involve using activity-based profiling technologies to identify putative drug targets as well as the discovery and development of small molecule regulators with new bioactivities.

Activity-based profiling is being performed on putative druggable classes of targets such as adenine and guanine nucleotide-binding and -hydrolyzing proteins to mine their biology and to identify novel molecular drug targets. Cancer as well as infectious disease (Mycobacterium tuberculosis) model systems are pursued.

The laboratory is working towards identifying and developing novel drug-like small molecule regulators (small molecule probes) targeted to small G-protein regulators, kinesins as well as nucleotide-binding proteins identified in activity-based profiling. Molecular targets from the mentioned classes involved in cellular transformation, mitosis, cytokinesis and Mtb latency are of special interest. Inhibitors and other bioactive regulators are identified through high throughput screening as well as virtual screening approaches in collaboration with chemoinformaticians and optimized in collaboration with medicinal chemists. Resulting molecular probes are subsequently used to further probe the biology of the targets and to assess their validity as therapeutic targets.

At FIMM Krister Wennerberg is also supervising the FIMM assay development and drug discovery pipelines and coordinates the Biocenter Finland Drug Discovery and Chemical Biology network.

Selected publications

1. Swenson-Fields KI, Sandquist JC, Rossol-Allison J, Blat IC, Wennerberg K, Burridge K, Means AR. 2008. MLK3 limits activated Gαq signaling to Rho by binding to p63RhoGEF. Mol. Cell. 32:43-56.

2. Dubash AD, Wennerberg K, García-Mata R, Menold MM, Arthur WT, Burridge K. 2007. A novel role for Lsc/p115 RhoGEF and LARG in regulating RhoA activity downstream of adhesion to fibronectin. J. Cell Sci. 120:3989-3998.

3. Wennerberg K, Forget MA, Ellerbroek SM, Arthur WT, Burridge K, Settleman J, Der CJ, Hansen SH. 2003.  Rnd proteins function as RhoA antagonists by activating p190 RhoGAP. Curr. Biol. 2003 13:1106-1115.

4. Arthur WT, Ellerbroek SM, Der CJ, Burridge K, Wennerberg K. 2002. XPLN, a guanine nucleotide exchange factor for RhoA and RhoB, but not RhoC. J. Biol. Chem. 277:42964-42972.

Group Members

Open positions in the Wennerberg lab

We are always interested to receive inquiries from talented Postdoc candidates, PhD or undergraduate students to work in the group.
 Please send your inquiry (including a cover letter describing your research ambitions and experience; and a CV including contact information for 2 references) to krister.wennerberg@fimm.fi.