David J Vocadlo

David Vocadlo is a Canada Research Chair (CRC - Tier I) in Chemical Biology, founder of the Centre for High Throughput Chemical Biology (cHTCB), and professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at Simon Fraser University (SFU).

David Vocadlo completed his PhD in Biological Chemistry at the University of British Columbia in 2002. He was a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) post-doctoral fellow at the University of California at Berkeley in the Departments of Chemistry and Molecular and Cell Biology. Returning to Canada in 2004, he joined SFU where he is a professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Molecular Biology and Biochemistry.

He and his team work at the interface of chemistry and biology to develop chemical tools for probing unusual carbohydrate structures found on the surface and the inside of cells. Using these new tools that enable new experiments they seek to illuminate the roles played by these glycans within cellular and organismal models. A major theme of research in the laboratory involves uncovering the functional roles of nuclear and cytoplasmic modification of proteins with O-GlcNAc in the regulation of gene expression.

Vocadlo and the laboratory of Chemical Glycobiology that he heads have been recognized with several awards including for example the EWR Steacie Fellowship, Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 Award, and The Horace Isbell Award of the American Chemical Society. Dr. Vocadlo has authored over 100 papers and is an inventor on over a dozen patents. Based on research from his SFU laboratory showing inhibitors that increase brain O-GlcNAc levels can protect against neurodegeneration in transgenic mouse models of Alzheimer disease (AD), Dr. Vocadlo co-founded of Alectos Therapeutics, a biotechnology company dedicated to the development of small-molecule therapeutics for unmet medical needs including AD.