Dorothee Kern

Dorothee Kern (born 1966) is a professor of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology at Scripps Research and former player for the East German national basketball team.

In 2016, she cofounded Relay Therapeutics, a Massachusetts-based drug research company studying the motion of proteins using genomic data and computational biology. In 2020, she cofounded MOMA Therapeutics, a company working on drug discovery.

In 2017 she became a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, a scientific advisory body to the German government and citizens that serves as a liaison between the German scientific community and the rest of the world.

Life and career

Early life Born in Halle, a town in former East Germany, to parents Gerhard and Gertraude Hübner, she was an energetic child who began learning to play basketball as early as age seven. She achieved her goal of playing for the East German national basketball team by the time she was a teenager playing the position point guard, and she served as captain of the team.

Family Kern is married to Gunther Kern and has two daughters, Julia and Nadja. Julia Kern attended Dartmouth College and is a member of the US Ski Team, participating in the cross-country skiing event. Nadja Kern attended UC San Diego and played on the women's basketball team at the university. She is now attending graduate school at UCSF studying biophysics. Examples of her research include the activation of proteins and changes in protein shape and the connection to allosteric regulation.

Kern's major research area of focus involves protein dynamics and how proteins move over time. Along with her father and husband, Kern published a paper on Vitamin B1 enzyme activation and was able to record the process unfolding utilizing a combination of NMR spectroscopy, X-ray crystallography, and biological computing. she began to apply her previous protein research to cancer biology. Along with her research team at Brandeis, Kern published a paper detailing their discoveries in which they utilized high-level biological computing and imaging to study the evolutionary shifts in protein structure of certain proteins and enzymes commonly involved in cancer over three million years of evolutionary history. This research was highly praised by the scientific community and has many potential future implications in specific targeting of anti-cancer drugs to cancer cells without affecting healthy cells. The goal of MOMA Therapeutics is to develop new drugs using the knowledge of molecular machines, protein conformational changes, and enzyme-substrate interaction in order to deliver medications more precisely.

Selected publications

Awards and honors Young Investigator Award of the International Association for Protein Structure Analysis (2002) Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry, American Chemical Society (2003) Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award (2004) Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator (2005) National Lecturer of the Biophysical Society (2009)