Michelle Arkin

Michelle Arkin is an Associate Professor in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and the Associate Director of Biology at the Small Molecule Discovery Center at UCSF. Michelle’s research interests include developing biological tools and drug leads for orphan and neglected diseases and designing compounds to modulate the function of allosterically regulated enzymes and protein-protein interactions (PPI). As associate director of the SMDC, Michelle oversees the high-throughput screening operation and collaborates with many academic and pharmaceutical laboratories to tackle challenging problems in drug discovery. Michelle earned her PhD in chemistry at Caltech and then held a Daymon Runyon postdoctoral fellowship at Genentech. She was among the first scientists at Sunesis Pharmaceuticals, where she developed inhibitors of PPI, including SAR1118, currently in phase 3 trials for dry-eye at SARcode. From 2005 to 2007, she was the Associate Director of Cell Biology at Sunesis and led the translational science team for Vosaroxin, an anti-cancer agent in phase 3 clinical trials.