Join Dr. GPCR at Discovery on Target 2026 in Boston, where GPCR science runs right through the heart of modern drug hunting. If you work in drug discovery or biotech, Boston in the fall is where the conversation happens. Discovery on Target returns September 28 to October 1, 2026, and this year GPCR science is woven into the broader Lead Generation Strategies program, sitting alongside covalent chemistry, DNA-encoded libraries, biophysics, and direct-to-biology. For us, that is a feature, not a footnote. GPCRs do not live in isolation, and neither do the people working on them. Seeing GPCR programs share a room with the newest hit-finding and lead-generation approaches is exactly how the field moves forward. Our founder, Yamina Berchiche, PhD, is honored to be chairing the Targeting GPCRs session on Wednesday, September 30. In the run-up to the meeting, she sat down with several of the scientists presenting and teaching this year to hear what they are bringing to Boston. Speaker Spotlight Ahead of the meeting, we sat down with four of the scientists presenting and teaching in the GPCR track this year. Here are our conversations. Evan O'Brien, PhD, Johns Hopkins University Dr. O'Brien runs a lab at Johns Hopkins that blends cryo-electron microscopy with protein dynamics to build something closer to a movie of GPCR allostery than a single snapshot. His talk digs into the molecular basis of partial agonism at the mu opioid receptor, using mitragynine pseudoindoxyl and a newly identified allosteric pocket to tune signaling like a rheostat. In a result the field will enjoy, his team solved the same molecule bound in both the active and inactive states of the receptor, and the weak partial agonist still delivered meaningful pain relief in a mouse model. A great example of why what happens in the animal matters as much as what happens in the in vitro assay. Hailong Zhang, PhD, Shanghai Yogar Therapeutics Dr. Zhang is a structural biologist with more than two decades in small molecule research across oncology and metabolic disease. At Discovery on Target he presents YJ-015, a G protein biased APJ agonist developed as an adjuvant to GLP-1 therapy. The idea is elegant: GLP-1 agonists drive rapid weight loss but can take muscle along with the fat, and YJ-015 is designed to preserve muscle while the weight comes off. It is a timely look at how receptor pharmacology can sharpen one of the most talked-about therapeutic areas in the field. Kris Borzilleri, Pfizer A familiar face from last year, Kris Borzilleri is a longtime discovery scientist at Pfizer who moved from soluble proteins into the membrane protein world, bringing a deep biophysics toolkit with her. At Discovery on Target she is giving a talk on an NMR fragment screen against an orphan GPCR, describing how her team navigated hit follow-up to drive down compound potency. She is also co-teaching a short course on biophysical methods for GPCRs, covering protein NMR, SPR, and whole-cell SPR microscopy. Catch her on both the podium and in the classroom. Dr. Terry Kenakin, UNC and Head Instructor at Terry's Corner Dr. Kenakin is teaching a brand-new full-day short course in Boston on Monday, September 28: "The End Game: From Lead Optimization to Drug Candidate Selection." Six hours of instruction centered on the part of discovery where much of the attrition happens, once you actually have a compound in hand. Expect deep, practical treatment of affinity and efficacy, allosteric protein function, early safety, ADME, kinetics, and real case studies of compounds that looked promising and failed in the clinic, with a clear eye on why. As Dr. Kenakin puts it, the goal is to translate moving biological readouts into hard chemical terms that hold up and predict what a molecule will do in people. Why Dr. GPCR Is in This Conversation At Dr. GPCR, our mission is simple: connect the GPCR community, share knowledge, and accelerate innovation. Chairing the GPCR session at Discovery on Target is an extension of what we do every day, spotlighting strong science across academia and industry and bringing the people behind it together. We are a nonprofit, and we have spent six years building a trusted, science-first space for this community. Stepping into the GPCR track at Discovery on Target is part of that work. Inside the GPCR Track This Year The GPCR content is concentrated on Wednesday, September 30, and it spans an unusually wide slice of the field: Antifibrotic and anti-inflammatory targets, including GPR68 Biased ligand discovery and orphan receptors such as GPR75 Designer partial agonism at the mu opioid receptor Small molecule approaches to obesity through GIPR Muscle-sparing strategies for GLP-1-driven weight loss through APJ Structural biology of the opioid receptors using single molecule FRET and cryo-EM Fragment-based discovery for orphan GPCRs Membrane mimetics and how the lipid environment shapes receptor behavior There is also a morning roundtable on modern GPCR-targeted drug discovery, tackling which hit-finding strategies are actually delivering tractable GPCR leads, where AI and machine learning genuinely change the workflow, and which functional readouts teams trust enough to make go or no-go decisions. Keep Learning with Terry's Corner If you cannot get enough of Dr. Kenakin's teaching, Terry's Corner is our room where he breaks down receptor pharmacology, functional selectivity, and ligand bias in ways you can apply directly to your work. You can also sign up for the free weekly Kenakin brief delivered to your inbox at https://www.ecosystem.drgpcr.com/terry-corner#signuptc. We have GPCR-focused courses coming this fall as well, so stay tuned. Join Us in Boston Discovery on Target, Boston, MA. September 28 to October 1, 2026 Track: Lead Generation Strategies, with GPCR sessions on Wednesday, September 30 Registration and full agenda Use code GPCR26200 for $200 off the current registration rate as part of our collaboration with Discovery on Target. Let's connect, let's debate, and let's keep moving GPCR drug discovery forward, together.

At a conference booth in 2018, a researcher arrived with a problem that had already cost him months. He had engineered a mouse to make none of a particular receptor, a clean negative control, and yet several commercial antibodies still lit up the tissue, staining a protein that was not there. He had run every experiment correctly. What he lacked was any way to know, before he started, whether the reagent could be trusted. It is a quietly common story wherever people rely on GPCR antibodies, and it is where our conversation with the GeneTex team, Dr. Alexander Ball and Dr. Chia-Yi Lin, began. A word that admits what it doesn’t know Much of that trust problem, Dr. Ball suggested, begins with a single word. We tend to say a GPCR antibody is “validated,” as if validation were a box that could be checked and closed. Dr. Ball prefers a different word, characterization, and the distinction is not pedantic. Validation, to me, is asymptotic, it’s infinite. You can keep validating forever. But you can characterize an antibody: under these conditions, it does this. Characterization is the honest version. It states what an antibody does and does not do, in which application and against which control, and it shows the data behind each claim. It also leaves room for a truth every bench scientist knows: no reagent is ever finished being understood. For a class of reagents as demanding as GPCR antibodies, that humility turns out to be the point. Why GPCR antibodies punish you early Good GPCR antibodies are notoriously hard to make, and the reasons stack up before an animal is ever immunized. The receptors themselves often sit at very low abundance, so even finding a tissue that reliably presents one is work. Much of their surface is buried in the membrane, leaving little for an antibody to reach. And within a receptor family the sequences run so close, two chemokine receptors can share more than three-quarters of their identity, that choosing the wrong fragment to immunize against sinks the effort from the start. As Dr. Ball put it, you can be “doomed before you even shoot a rabbit.” The receptor that taught GeneTex this most sharply was LGR5, a marker of adult stem cells that matters across several cancers, and one that defeated a dozen commercial antibodies before the company’s own recombinant clones began to hold up. The shift to recombinant monoclonals is what changed the odds: because such an antibody is defined by its sequence, the clone that works today behaves the same way years from now, without the batch-to-batch drift that has quietly undermined so much drug discovery. The bar, made visible: GeneTex’s GPRC5A antibody gives a clean signal in wild-type cells (left) that disappears in the CRISPR knockout (right). Figure from the GeneTex webinar. Two ways into the same problem What gives the conversation its warmth is that neither guest set out to spend a career on antibodies. Dr. Ball came to them by way of medicine, an MD, training in internal medicine, then a turn to the research bench, and learned only there how unforgiving these reagents can be, in a lab where the same immunization could yield one superb antibody and one useless one. “You really don’t understand antibodies until you’re in the industry,” he said, and he meant it as a confession as much as a claim. Dr. Lin arrived from a different door. She trained as a stem-cell biologist, finished a PhD, and then followed a love of explaining science into a role few of her peers would have predicted, learning the craft, in her telling, partly by having her early drafts returned covered in red ink. She also carried a grievance that made the work personal: during her own PhD she had built a knockout mouse and could never find an antibody that gave an honest signal against it. She knew, first-hand, exactly the kind of wasted months the researcher at that booth was describing. Handing the question to the room The conviction underneath the science is an unusual one for a company: the real experts, Dr. Ball and Dr. Lin insist, are not the vendor but the researchers who run these systems every day. So rather than declare their antibodies finished, GeneTex has been putting them directly into the community’s hands, free vials, shipping covered, and asking for the honest verdict, good or bad. A reagent that fails in someone’s lab, they argue, is more useful to hear about than one that quietly succeeds and is never reported. It is a way of building a GPCR antibody catalog out loud, alongside the people who feel the cost of getting it wrong. What it means to know a reagent There is something bracing about a company that would rather say “here is what we have so far” than “validated.” It treats a reagent the way good science treats any claim, as provisional, held open to the next result. Whether a catalog can really be built this way, in the open and with the community as co-author, is still an unfinished question. But it reframes a familiar one. The next time a datasheet promises more than it delivers, the useful thing to ask may not be whether a GPCR antibody is validated, but how well, and by whom, it has been characterized. Listen to the full conversation with Dr. Ball and Dr. Lin Watch the webinar recording with Dr. Ball

I have been thinking about this event since the moment it ended. On April 29, GPCR scientists walked into Pressed Cafe in Boston's Prudential Center and did something that doesn't happen enough in our field: they just talked. No presentations. No panels. No agenda. Just people who care deeply about GPCR science, in one room, having the kind of conversations that usually happen in hallways or never at all. This was the first Dr. GPCR Happy Hour of 2026, and it reminded me exactly why we started this community. The GPCR Happy Hour Room What struck me first was the range. We had trainees and CSOs standing next to each other, talking like peers. That is not an accident, it is the goal. Dr. GPCR exists to democratize this field, to create spaces where the most junior scientist in the room can have a real conversation with the most senior one, and where what you work on matters more than your title. Take a look at this little montage we created. The Colorful Name Tags Forty-eight hours before the event I ordered a set of colorful name tags on Amazon. Not because they were colorful but because I remembered that the ones I have at home are at least 15 years old. I picked the pack that was the first at the top of the list with the best reviews and fast delivery. They arrived the day before the Happy Hour. No system, no color coding, just a pile of options and the invitation to pick whichever one you wanted. These colorful name tags became the unexpected hit of the night. People were drawn to them immediately. Conversations started around the name tag table before anyone had even found their drink. Something about the color and the informality signaled: this is not that kind of event. You can relax. You belong here. At some point during the evening, I noticed a family at a nearby table checking out our check-in table. These were regular restaurant guests who had nothing to do with GPCR science. Their kids had joined in to make themselves name tags which I encouraged by telling them that they are welcome to take more than one. It is one of the things from the whole night that we couldn't have planned. Even the room around us caught the energy. This was the result. The Space A word about Pressed Cafe. We could not have asked for a better venue or a better team. The general manager helped us set up personally, and the space felt warm and welcoming from the moment we walked in. It felt like a place that wanted a community event to happen inside it. We will be going back in the fall on September 30th. Same venue, same city, same format. The People Who Made It Possible The Dr. GPCR Happy Hour is free to every scientist who walks in. That is only possible because of the co-hosts who believe in what we are building. Thank you to NanoImaging Services, Revvity, EuroscreenFast, and Montana Molecular for making the Boston Happy Hour happen. Dr. GPCR is a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit, and your support goes directly into the room. The food, the drinks, the space, and the experience every scientist gets to walk away from without ever reaching for their wallet. The Conversation We Are Still Having Before the event, Giovanna Scapin, CSO of NanoImaging Services, sat down with me for a conversation about GPCR structural biology and what NIS is building for the community. That conversation is now on the Dr. GPCR YouTube channel, and I encourage you to watch it. It is exactly the kind of peer-to-peer exchange that this community exists to create. What Comes Next The next Dr. GPCR Happy Hour is coming in the fall, co-located with Discovery on Target in Boston, September 28 to October 1. If you want to be in the room, stay close — registration details will go out to the community first. And if the Boston Happy Hour is your first introduction to Dr. GPCR: welcome. This is what we do. Come find us in the fall. If you want to stay close to the science between events, the Dr. GPCR ecosystem is where the community lives year-round, the Weekly News, the Masterclass library, and the people https://www.ecosystem.drgpcr.com/gpcr-university

Lin and Ball of GeneTex on GPCR antibody characterization, recombinant monoclonals, five-pillar validation, and the LGR5 challenge. << Back to podcast list Strategic Partner(s) Lin and Ball: GPCR Antibody Characterization and the Recombinant Shift Reliable antibodies are not a convenience in GPCR research - they are the foundation on which every expression and localization experiment rests. Yet the GPCR field has lived with a quiet, persistent problem: antibodies that pass catalog-level QC, ship to a lab, and fail in the only system that matters. This conversation examines that problem from the inside. Chia-Yi Lin and Alexander Ball, both scientists-turned-industry professionals at GeneTex, trace how the commercial antibody landscape has shifted over the past decade - away from polyclonal and hybridoma-based production toward recombinant monoclonal antibodies built around rigorous five-pillar characterization. The conversation covers why GPCR targets are especially difficult to immunize against, how receptor family homology between targets like CXCR1 and CXCR2 makes immunogen selection a critical and underappreciated decision point, and what it actually looks like to validate an antibody against a target as stubborn as LGR5. For Ball, the stakes became concrete years before GeneTex - in a research lab where the reliability of a single antibody determined whether an experiment could move forward at all. That experience runs through this entire conversation. ABOUT THE GUESTS Alexander Ball is a senior scientist at GeneTex who joined the company in 2012 after training in medicine at the University of Southern California and spending years at the research bench, where he worked directly with antibody production and encountered firsthand the variability inherent in polyclonal reagents. At GeneTex, he oversees target selection, QA review, and scientific outreach, and serves as the direct point of contact for GPCR researchers requesting free antibody samples through the Dr. GPCR ecosystem. His dual perspective - having depended on antibodies as a bench scientist and now helping produce them - shapes how GeneTex approaches community collaboration for the GPCR field. Chia-Yi Lin is the head of international sales, marketing, technical support, and logistics at GeneTex International in Taiwan, which she joined in 2016 after completing a PhD in stem cell biology at the University of Edinburgh and a postdoctoral fellowship. Her own experience with GPCR antibody failures during knockout mouse experiments - purchasing commercial antibodies that produced signal where none should exist - gave her an early, direct understanding of what the field was missing. She now leads the programs connecting GeneTex's growing catalog of recombinant GPCR antibodies with the researchers best positioned to characterize them. SCIENTIFIC THEMES OF THE CONVERSATION The GPCR antibody reliability problem - how it developed, why it persists, and what systematic characterization requires Immunogen selection as the critical upstream decision in GPCR antibody development The five-pillar approach to antibody characterization applied to notoriously difficult receptor targets Recombinant monoclonal antibodies as the structural solution to batch variability and reproducibility Researcher-company collaboration as an active ingredient in antibody quality - not a support function Career transitions from bench science to the reagent industry, and what that crossing of worlds makes visible KEY INSIGHTS FROM THE CONVERSATION 1. GPCR Family Homology Makes Immunogen Selection the Deciding Variable Before a single rabbit is immunized, the choice of immunogen has already determined whether a GPCR antibody can succeed. Chemokine receptors like CXCR1 and CXCR2 share over 75% sequence identity - use the wrong peptide region and the resulting antibody is cross-reactive before it leaves production. Ball describes this as the point where most GPCR antibody programs are already lost, long before any downstream characterization begins. 2. LGR5 Became GeneTex's Reckoning with the GPCR Target Class LGR5 - a receptor critical to adult stem cell maintenance in intestinal crypts and implicated in several malignancies - was the target that made the difficulty of GPCR antibody development concrete for GeneTex. Ball recounts his company's president going pale when the subject came up: every commercial antibody they tested failed to meet expectations, and their own early attempts were no more reliable. Years later, GeneTex now has both polyclonal and recombinant monoclonal options for LGR5 - but the process to get there reshaped how the company approaches the entire GPCR category. 3. "Characterized" Is More Honest Than "Validated" - and the Difference Matters The word "validated" implies a finished state that no antibody ever truly reaches. Ball and Lin argue that "characterized" is the more accurate frame - an antibody has been tested in specific applications, against specific cell lines, using specific controls, and those results are known. What is not shown on a data sheet is also information: the absence of a Western blot entry does not mean the experiment was never run. Researchers who understand this read data sheets differently, and ask better questions before purchasing. 4. A Researcher at SFN, a Knockout Mouse, and No Working Antibodies Lin's first antibody conference was SFN in 2018. A researcher approached the GeneTex booth and described his situation: he had knockout mice for the mu opioid receptor, purchased multiple commercial antibodies, and found that several of them produced signal in the knockout - the clearest possible evidence of non-specificity. GeneTex had nothing for that target at the time. But the encounter crystallized the problem Lin had been reading about abstractly: the GPCR research community was spending real time and money on reagents that were quietly producing false results, with no reliable way to know before the experiment was run. 5. Recombinant Monoclonals Solve the Problem Polyclonals Were Never Designed to Solve Polyclonal antibodies are inherently variable: each new production batch is a different rabbit, a different immune response, a different mixture of binding clones. For most targets, that variability is manageable. For GPCRs - which are difficult to express, difficult to immunize against, and require extensive characterization work to pass validation - that variability means that every batch can undo what the previous one demonstrated. Recombinant monoclonal antibodies eliminate this uncertainty: the sequence is defined, stored in a plasmid, and reproducible at any scale, indefinitely. As Ball puts it, the antibody does not run out because a rabbit does. 6. The Most Expensive Thing a Lab Can Waste Is Not Money Ball's most direct recommendation to researchers is to contact the company before buying - not after the experiment fails. The cost of starting with a reagent that cannot do what a project requires is not measured in catalog prices but in the time of students, postdocs, and scientists who run months of experiments before the antibody itself is questioned. GeneTex's approach to the GPCR community - offering free samples for testing in researcher-owned systems - is a direct response to this: the company needs external expert feedback, and the researcher needs a reagent that actually works. 7. What Scientists Who Cross Into Industry Learn That Those at the Bench Cannot Both Ball and Lin arrived at GeneTex from active research positions, and both describe a shift in how they understood antibodies only after making that transition. At the bench, an antibody is a tool you trust or distrust based on results. Inside a company, you understand the full range of decisions - immunogen design, host selection, production format, QC protocol - that determine what a researcher receives. Ball is direct about this: the full gestalt of the antibody world is not visible from the bench, and that gap in understanding contributes to the antibody problems researchers encounter without knowing why. EPISODE TIMELINE Timestamps are AI-generated based on the provided transcript and may vary slightly from the final edited video. Use timestamps as a navigational guide. 00:00 Sponsor message and host intro 00:58 Introducing Lin and Ball - roles and context at GeneTex 03:25 GeneTex history - from a Texas research lab to a global antibody company 05:49 The antibody reproducibility crisis and how GeneTex responded 09:25 Lin's path from stem cell biology PhD to leading antibody characterization programs 12:20 Ball's path from medical school to the research bench to GeneTex 14:38 The scientists who founded GeneTex and the scientific problems that shaped the company 16:49 LGR5 - the GPCR that exposed how deep the antibody quality problem runs 19:21 A researcher walks up at SFN with knockout mice and no working antibodies 21:49 What researchers get wrong with antibody selection - and what to ask instead 25:00 Five-pillar characterization in practice - KO lines, comparable antibodies, GPCR arrays 30:19 Recombinant monoclonals vs. polyclonals - what changes for GPCR research 36:55 If not antibodies - Ball and Lin on the power of scientific communication 39:40 The GPCR therapeutic market and what remains untapped SELECTED QUOTES "Making antibodies, of course, needs some technique. But to verify them - to characterize them, to validate them - it actually takes more effort. And that has to be based on science." Chia-Yi Lin "If you don't choose the immunogen properly, you're already messed up. You're doomed before you even shoot a rabbit." Alexander Ball "You really don't understand antibodies until you're in the industry. I think people at the bench haven't had that experience. You really get it once you're actually in the industry." Alexander Ball "It's defined by the primary sequence. It's there. It's in a plasmid. It's not going away. It's inexhaustible." Alexander Ball, on recombinant monoclonal antibodies Unlock the Full Dr. GPCR Learning Ecosystem ✔ Full Masterclass library ✔ Terry's Pharmacology Corner ✔ Advanced GPCR courses ✔ Scientific discussions → Become Premium Upcoming Live Expert Sessions ➚ 🔒Explore the Full Masterclass ➚ Enjoying the Dr. GPCR Podcast? Leave a Review. Leave a quick review to help more scientists find the show—and help us keep improving every episode. It takes <60 seconds and makes a big difference. ★ Review on Apple Podcasts ★ Rate on Spotify ✉️ Send feedback to the team Thanks for listening to this podcast episode Follow us on your favorite Podcast Player << Previous Podcast Episode Next Podcast Episode >>

Dr. GPCR Podcast - The Voice of the Community Whether you’re a scientist, student, or just curious, you’ll hear about discoveries, career stories, and the latest GPCR news. Jump in and get inspired! Strategic Partners Latest Podcast Episodes Select by Guest Name 2026-06-10 2026-04-29 2026-03-04 2025-12-17 2026-05-27 2026-04-01 2026-02-18 2025-12-03 2026-05-13 2026-03-18 2026-02-04 2025-11-19 1 2 3 4 5 1 ... 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 ... 16 Enjoying the Dr. GPCR Podcast? Leave a Review. Leave a quick review to help more scientists find the show—and help us keep improving every episode. It takes <60 seconds and makes a big difference. ★ Review on Apple Podcasts ★ Rate on Spotify ✉️ Send feedback to the team Thanks for listening to this podcast episode Follow us on your favorite Podcast Player Listen and subscribe where you get your podcasts

Explore the world of GPCRs with Dr. GPCR Podcast! Join industry leaders as they share insights, stories, and groundbreaking discoveries, enriching our understanding of GPCRs. Delve into the science behind these vital components shaping our collective knowledge. Welcome to the Dr. GPCR Podcast - The Voice of the Community Conversations with the world’s leading GPCR scientists. Exploring discoveries, careers, and ideas shaping human health. In each episode, we sit down with leading experts to explore their career journeys, groundbreaking discoveries, and the impact of their research on our shared understanding of GPCR biology. Launched at the height of the pandemic, the Dr. GPCR Podcast was created with three goals: Share discoveries – Highlight the latest advances in the GPCR field. Amplify voices – Provide scientists a platform to showcase their work. Inspire the future – Motivate the next generation to pursue GPCR research. At its core, Dr. GPCR’s mission is simple yet ambitious: to bring the GPCR community together - across borders and disciplines - to connect, exchange, and collaborate in order to improve human health through a deeper understanding of GPCR biology. Latest Podcast Episodes More podcast episodes Dr. GPCR Podcast Audience Survey We are currently planning our next season and need your help. This short survey will help us understand your needs to bring you exciting and informative content. We also know that you are busy, which is why we designed this short survey that should take you 5 minutes. Fill out this form Be our Guest In each episode, we chat with an expert about their career trajectory, discoveries, and how their research contributed to the shared pool of knowledge about GPCR biology. We’d love to have you on our podcast. To be a guest, fill out the form below, and we’ll be in touch in 48 hours. Fill out this form What others are saying about this podcast "You made it a very comfortable and engaging experience, and it felt like we were chatting over coffee — Yamina thoughtfully guided our chat throughout." Anita Nivedha I think it's really well done. I'm genuinely interested to see how it evolves and grows over time, as I feel it has the potential to develop into something even more impactful. Anonymous This came at just the most perfect time. I hadn't heard a scientific talk outside my lab since February and was starved to hear someone else talk passionately about GPCRs. I've listened to the episodes multiple times and it's just like being at a conference getting new ideas. I just couldn't be happier y'all created this podcast. Anonymous Great initiative, thanks. Carrier paths, choosing research topics, switching fields, late start, failures and successes. Anonymous I enjoy the breadth of questioning that goes beyond just the science, and reveals a bit about the scientists as individuals/mentors/people. Anonymous Really enjoyable science podcast! Dr. Yamina Berchiche interviews leading GPCR scientists on this vibrant, entertaining podcast. I really appreciate the way the podcast educates and mentors, particularly towards junior scientists but also to the community as a wholen Yamina is a great interviewer, getting insight and personal history from her guests. Am very grateful for Dr GPCR livening up the week in these difficult times! Sam @Pharmamechanic Listen and subscribe where you get your podcasts