Bastien Casu
Cryo-EM & TEM Specialist - Structural Biology University of California, Irvine
Bastien Casu, PhD, is a structural biologist and cryo-electron microscopy specialist with extensive expertise in cryo-EM, cryo-electron tomography, and high-resolution structural biology. He currently serves as Cryo-EM Specialist at the UC Irvine Materials Research Institute, where he supports researchers across structural biology, cell biology, and materials science through technical training, method development, and scientific collaboration. Prior to UC Irvine, Bastien spent more than seven years at ETH Zürich as a postdoctoral researcher and senior scientist, applying cryo-EM and cryo-ET to investigate complex biological systems. His expertise spans advanced microscopy instrumentation, sample preparation, image processing, and structure determination, enabling researchers to unlock molecular insights and drive scientific discovery.
Seminars
- Applying cryo-EM and cryo-tomography to increasingly complex biological systems to generate structural information where conventional crystallography may be difficult to apply
- Exploring in-cell and near-native structural approaches to investigate targets within more physiologically relevant environments and capture complex biological interactions
- Translating emerging structural information into drug discovery strategies to expand the reach of SBDD towards new targets and therapeutic modalities
As cryo-EM becomes increasingly important for structure-based drug discovery, the field is facing a fundamental throughput challenge. Long data collection times, limited microscope access, difficult sample preparation, computationally intensive analysis, and manual structure building can restrict the number of structures that can be delivered to discovery teams. Join structural biology leaders, cryo-EM specialists, and technology developers as they discuss how to scale cryo-EM workflows to meet the growing demands of modern drug discovery by:
- Overcoming access and throughput limitations, examining how companies are managing constrained microscope capacity, external facilities, CRO access, and the need to generate sufficient structures to support increasingly large discovery pipelines
- Improving sample preparation and data quality, discussing how grid development, alternative sample preparation approaches, additives, and better understanding of sample-specific behaviour can reduce failed experiments and increase the probability of obtaining high-quality structures
- Automating the cryo-EM workflow, exploring how advances in instrumentation, AI-enabled data processing, automated structure building, and improved computational infrastructure can reduce manual intervention and increase the number of actionable structures delivered to drug discovery teams
