Paola Castaldi

Paola Castaldi is the Director and global Head of Chemical Biology & Proteomics at AstraZeneca. Her team is focused on supporting drug discovery programs across all therapeutics areas using state of the art technologies with specific emphasis on target identification, target engagement, MoA and off-target determination. Paola has played a critical role to establish a multi-omics and a therapeutic protein degradation platform at AstraZeneca providing both strategic and logistics directions. Before AstraZeneca, Paola was a key contributor of the Chemical Genetics group at Sanofi Oncology, Cambridge, MA with a focus on phenotypic drug discovery projects for the Wnt and KRAS oncogenic pathways. Prior to Sanofi Paola was at Makoto Life Sciences, where she was responsible for the chemistry strategies towards the identification of the PRPK/TPRKB complex as validated biological targets of immunomodulatory drugs that include lenalidomide (Revlimid), pomalidomide (Pomalyst) and thalidomide implicated in multiple myeloma. Paola Castaldi completed her undergraduate studies in pharmaceutical chemistry and received her Laurea (MSc) at University of Padova, Italy. She then went on to conduct graduate research studies at Imperial College London, UK and postdoctoral studies at UCSD and Boston University.