Career Discovery: Industry

Stephen Helliwell received his BSc Honours in Biochemistry from the University of Kent in 1992. During his PhD in Biochemistry (1996) at the Biozentrum, University of Basel, he identified one of the targets (Tor1p) of the anticancer drug rapamycin (Afinitor). Following a short Post-Doctoral stay at the University of Bern, he moved to the Department of Biology at MIT as a Post-Doctoral Fellow. There he discovered novel ubiquitination factors controlling Golgi-to-endosome sorting of membrane proteins, and continued this research at the Biozentrum, University of Basel from 2002 to 2005. He joined the Novartis Institutes of BioMedical Research in 2005. After 6 years focusing on small molecule target identification using chemogenomic profiling, he is now leading projects to treat disorders caused by defective mitochondrial metabolism, with a focus on liver dysfunction. He continues to lecture at the Biozentrum, University of Basel.