Speaker Profile
Florence Wagner

Florence Wagner PhD

Psychiatry
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America

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Florence Wagner is director of the medicinal chemistry group in the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at Broad Institute. Her group focuses on designing and implementing strategies that will enable development of novel therapies for central nervous system-related psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and cognitive impairment. These strategies include the rational design and development of novel, potent, and highly selective small molecules suitable for clinical development.

The targets span from epigenetics (HDACs), kinases, G-protein coupled receptors, and voltage-gated ion channels. Recent findings of note include the design of a toolkit of differentially selective HDAC inhibitors to explore the functional activity of the individual HDAC isoforms and discovery of first-in-class isoform selective inhibitors of the glycogen synthase kinase 3 (GSK3), which will provide key insights to direct therapeutic efforts.

Wagner obtained her master’s degree from the Department of Chemistry and Process Engineering at the Lyon (France) School of Chemistry and Electronics. Her keen interest in drug discovery developed out of a year-long internship at Scynexis in North Carolina.

From there, she went on to North Carolina State University, where her doctoral research under the supervision of Daniel L. Comins focused on developing novel methods for the synthesis of nicotine derivatives for application in neurodegenerative disorders. Prior to joining the Stanley Center, Wagner worked for Altiris (formerly Metastatix, Inc.) in Atlanta, GA, on the discovery of chemokine receptor modulators. She joined the Broad Institute in 2008.