Journal of Developing Drugs
Open Access

Esther Woon

Biography

Dr Esther Woon received her Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry from the University of Bath, Department of Pharmacy in 2004. She then received an AICR postdoctoral fellowship to study the mechanism and inhibition of protein-protein interaction at the UCL School of Pharmacy. In 2008, she was awarded a European Union-funded postdoctoral fellowship to work on epigenetic probe discovery at the University of Oxford, Department of Chemistry, where she contributed to the first report of several highly selective and potent small molecule probes for the histone and nucleic acid demethylases. This work enabled subsequent functional and mechanistic studies on these enzymes. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Pharmacy, National University of Singapore. She continues to work in the field of epigenetics, and is the leading group in developing dynamic boron chemistry-based methods for rapid probe/ drug discovery.

Research Interest

1. Development of selective and cell-active probes to study the epigenetic basis for obesity and other metabolic diseases.
2. Applying a combination of crystallographic and other biophysical techniques to understand the mechanism for substrate specificity for the JmjC histone demethylases.
3. Development of Dynamic Combinatorial Chemistry (DCC)-based techniques suitable for the rapid discovery of drugs.