Stefan Kubicek

Stefan Kubicek, PhD, is an Austrian citizen born in 1978 in Vienna. He studied synthetic organic chemistry at the Vienna University of Technology and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (with Francois Diederich, ETH Zürich). For his PhD in Molecular Biology, he developed the first specific histone methyltransferase inhibitor at the Institute of Molecular Pathology IMP Vienna (advisor Thomas Jenuwein). He then spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, MA, US (Chemical Biology Program, Stuart Schreiber). Since 2010, he has headed the Platform Austria for Chemical Biology PLACEBO at CeMM. Since 2013, he has headed the Christian Doppler laboratory for Chemical Epigenetics and Antiinfectives, a public-private partnership between CeMM, Boehringer Ingelheim, and Haplogen. Research in the Kubicek lab is funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the European Union, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation JDRF, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy and the National Foundation for Research, Technology, and Development. Stefan Kubicek’s research focuses on chromatin, epigenetics and small molecules that change cell fates in oncology and diabetes. Specific projects address chromatin proteins as druggable targets in synthetic-lethal interactions in cancer, and small molecules that induce the generation of insulin-producing beta cells from other cell types by transdifferentiation. Recent publications reported the identification of the dependence of Notch-activated breast cancers on SUMOylation, the first single-cell transcriptomes from primary human pancreatic islets, and the identification of TAF1 bromodomain inhibitors that phenocopy BRD4 inhibition in leukaemia cells.