Brian Kraybill

Background

About Brian Kraybill

I love drug discovery, development, and manufacture! This love was born when Professor Peter Schultz, second semester organic chemistry at UC Berkeley, described how penicillin worked to inhibit bacterial cell wall synthesis. The story about the battle by chemists & biologists to defeat the bacterial resistance evolution remains one of my favorite stories! My career started there and progressed as I aced the class, got an undergrad research position in Prof. Schultz lab, went to graduate school and joined Prof. Kevan Shokat's group, completed my Ph.D. designed, used, and published on new radiolabeled substrates we synthesized for mutant kinases. Kevan won a case of beer from a colleague the day I showed how well that worked, and I got to graduate. My first job was a postdoc with Professor Suzanne Walker who moved her group to Harvard Medical School, where a graduate student and I synthesized a fluorescence polarization probe to use in a high throughput screen for o-linked GlucNAc Transferase inhibitors at the Institute of Chemistry and Biology. Success in this effort was published and led to a job training postdoc's and students how to develop and optimize HTS assays at the ICCB paid by a grant aimed at Biodefense. From there I moved into industry joining the In Vitro Pharmacology group supporting hit to lead and lead optimization drug discovery efforts such as described in our JAK3 publication in J Pharmacol Exp Ther 361:229–244, May 2017. Leading a team of two, Peter Goldenblatt and myself, mentored by my boss Alex Szewczak and Department Head Ilona Kariv, we efficiently executed project support assays, method development, automation, method transfers and participated in project core team leadership by discerning and implementing In Vitro Pharmacology strategies appropriate for the phase of the projects over the years. In 2013, I moved from Merck to Alcon, out of basic research and into product development with my first role as initiating CMC Team Lead for the now product Systane Complete. As Novartis began making more changes at Alcon, I moved to a project supporting late phase development of the now biologic therapeutic drug Beovu. Success afforded the opportunity to move back to Alcon supporting drug and medical device production in an MS & T role from 2019-2022. Most recently I made the transition back into novel research & development in Oncology with a move to iBio as a Principle Scientist in Analytical Sciences. This move also included a move back into management. Along the way I have become a happy husband and proud father!