Benedict Cross
Chief Technology Officer & Head of Platform PhoreMost
Ben is the CTO and Head of Platform at PhoreMost Ltd, a drug discovery company based in Cambridge, UK. He is a geneticist & biotechnologist and has pioneered the use of computationally engineered mini-proteins to enable new medicine development, including degrader-based drugs. Ben has research expertise in proteostasis, functional genomics and chemical genetic screening. He is the inventor of the GlueSEEKER platform at PhoreMost and has authored over 30 peer reviewed studies and patents working at the intersection of biology, drug discovery and data science. As a serial biotech platform builder, Ben has a proclivity for collaboration and for engineering business alliances across the life sciences sector.
Seminars
- What criteria and validation strategies should be used to determine whether a novel E3 ligase is suitable for therapeutic development?
- In what ways do novel ligases offer functional or pharmacological advantages over traditional ligases like CRBN or VHL?
- How can we build a compelling case—biologically and commercially—for prioritizing a novel ligase over established workhorses in drug development pipelines?
- Building a high-throughput, functional genomics-based platform to prospectively induce degradation-conducive neo-protein–protein interactions (neo-PPI)
- Unlocking novel molecular glue degraders by engineering neo-PPI beyond precedented ligase–target pairs
- Showcasing how this approach broadens the degrader discovery landscape with new mechanisms and targets
