Anthe Janssen | Assistant Professor, Leiden University

Anthe Janssen obtained his bachelor's degree in Molecular Science and Technology, a shared programme between the TU Delft and Leiden University in 2011 cum laude. He continued his studies with the master programme Chemistry with a specialisation in ‘Design and Synthesis’ at Leiden University and obtained his degree summa cum laude in 2014. During his master's education he performed an industrial research internship at ASML in Veldhoven, the Netherlands which focused on the physicochemical understanding of the phase separation of polymers in confined lithographic spaces, and potential applications thereof. He performed his major research project in the Bio-organic Synthesis group with prof. dr. G. A. van der Marel. This research studied the synthesis of small iminosugars and their conformational behaviour under varying acidity in aqueous and organic solvents. The work formed the basis for a publication. For this thesis he was awarded the Unilever Research Prize 2014.

In 2014 he started his doctoral studies in the Leiden Institute of Chemistry, in the group of Molecular Physiology under supervision of prof. M. van der Stelt. Here he worked on the design, synthesis and biochemical evaluation of new diacylglycerol lipase inhibitors (J. Med. Chem., 2019). He was also involved in the project elucidating the off-targets of the experimental drug BIA 10-2474, a fatty acid amide hydrolase inhibitor, which caused severe neurological symptoms and killed a patient in a first-into-human study in France (Science, 2017).

The first machine learning work was an in silico prediction model for kinase inhibitor selectivity (JCIM, 2019), starting what became a close collaboration with dr. G.J.P. van Westen, now professor at the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research. He defended his thesis titled ‘Inhibitor Selectivity: Profiling and Prediction’ in May 2019. He stayed in Leiden for a postdoc as part of the Oncode Institute, maintaining the collaboration with professor Van Westen and professor Van der Stelt.

In July 2020 he was appointed as assistant professor in computational chemical biology, and as such will continue the integration of computational drug discovery into the experimental fields of medicinal chemistry and chemical biology.