Bushra Husain, Ph.D.

Senior Scientific Researcher, Genentech Inc.

Bushra Husain received her doctorate in biochemistry at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, studying the mechanism of dimerization and activation of Protein Kinase R in binding viral dsRNAs. Soon after, she joined the Protein Sciences and Screening group at Merck, PA as a senior scientist, and shifted her focus to purification and characterization of challenging multi-pass membrane proteins to support antibody engineering and small molecule screening efforts. She is now part of Genentech’s Receptor Discovery group, whose goal is to identify, characterize, and help modulate novel receptor-ligand or receptor-receptor interactions that are biologically relevant to disease progression, enabling programs within their oncology, cancer immunology, and neuroscience portfolio. She also co-developed and established a robust proximity-based approach to identify unknown human receptor interactions using a miniaturized AlphaScreen assay, and a high coverage library of human single-transmembrane receptors. This is only one of several cutting-edge technologies at the forefront of the receptor-ligand interaction field worldwide developed by their lab to robustly detect challenging membrane protein interactions at high-throughput.