Guest speaker Natalie Scholes

Natalie Scholes PhD (Department of Molecular Genetics, Netherlands Cancer Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands) will give a guest lecture at Sanquin Amsterdam on 24 September 2026 at 4:00 PM.

Title: Hijacking intrinsic proteolytic networks: how inhibitors can also act as degraders

Host: Derk Amsen

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Natalie Scholes is a chemical biologist and Junior Group Leader at the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) in Amsterdam, where she launched her laboratory in 2026. Her group focuses on chemical inducers of proximity—small molecules that bring proteins together to rewire cellular signaling networks—with the goal of developing new therapeutic strategies against cancer by harnessing or amplifying the cell’s own protein-quality-control and degradation systems.

Scholes received undergraduate training at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, followed by a PhD on engineering developmental pattern formation in mammalian cells from the Imperial College London. As a postdoctoral fellow in Georg Winter’s laboratory at CeMM in Vienna, she investigated non-obvious actions of small molecules and, in particular, the unexpected ability of many kinase inhibitors to accelerate turnover of their targets through native proteolytic circuits (Scholes, N. S. et al. Inhibitors supercharge kinase turnover through native proteolytic circuits. Nature 649, 1032).

Expect to learn about signal transduction, the cellular proteolytic degradation machinery and chemical tricks to subvert these for therapeutic, but also for research purposes.