Mats Wikstrom
Associate Director & Group Leader Amgen Inc.
Mats Wikström is Associate Director and Group Leader at Amgen, where he leads teams focused on the application of structural biology and biophysical sciences to biologics discovery and development. With over 25 years of experience spanning academia and industry, Mats has held senior scientific leadership roles at Amgen, Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research, Karolinska Institutet, Sobi, and Pharmacia. His expertise encompasses protein structure determination, protein-protein interactions, biophysics, NMR, X-ray crystallography, and drug discovery. Alongside his industry career, he serves as Associate Professor at Lund University, contributing to advancing structural and molecular understanding of therapeutic targets and biologics.
Seminars
- Applying NMR to characterize higher-order structure and conformational integrity of protein therapeutics to generate detailed structural insights that complement traditional analytical methods and increase confidence in product quality attributes
- Leveraging NMR for product characterization assessments to detect structural changes arising from manufacturing, formulation, process modifications, or storage conditions that may impact therapeutic performance
- Integrating NMR-derived structural data into regulatory strategies and submissions to support higher-order structure evaluation throughout product development and lifecycle management
Structural biology can provide powerful insights into molecular recognition and binding, but its greatest value comes when those insights are generated early enough and applied broadly enough to influence drug design. As discovery teams increasingly seek to use structures to improve not only binding but also stability, expression, and developability, the challenge is creating workflows that translate structural information into better molecules. Join structural biologists, medicinal chemists, computational scientists, and drug discovery leaders as they discuss how to maximise the impact of SBDD on candidate progression by:
- Bringing structural information earlier into discovery, examining how delays between chemistry and structural data can limit decision making and how teams can prioritize structures that have the greatest potential to influence molecular design
- Translating structural insights into broader molecular optimization, exploring how structural information can be used to improve affinity and binding while also informing stability, expression, and developability
- Connecting structure-guided design with candidate progression, discussing how structural and computational insights can be incorporated into hit prioritization, lead optimization, and candidate selection to deliver better molecules more efficiently
