Jens Peter von Kries is a Group Leader and the Head of the Screening Facility at Leibniz Research Institute for Molecular Pharmacology (FMP) in Berlin. He has made significant contributions to the field of biology and drug discovery. After completing his diploma and PhD in Biology at the University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf under the guidance of Prof. Strätling, he pursued research on proteins involved in the origin of cancer at the lab of W. Birchmeier from 1995 to 2000. He then transitioned to the industry and served as the head of the Screening Unit at Semaia Pharmaceuticals from 2000 to 2003. In 2003, he joined the FMP and became the Head of the Screening Unit, where he set up and developed various technologies for drug discovery. Over the years, he has established several core facilities, including those for Helmholtz-Initiative für Wirkstoffforschung, Chemical Biology at the Berlin Institute of Health, and EU-OPENSCREEN. He has also been recognized for his contributions to the field of chemical biology, serving as the Chairman of the Gemeinsame Fachgruppe Chemische Biologie at DECHEMA from 2011 to 2015 and as a member of the Advisory Board SFICAST at the University of Oslo in 2014.
Contributions to the project
The Screening Unit serves as an open-access technology platform for automated screening, using either compound libraries such as the ChemBioNet and other collections (60,000 compounds) or genome-wide RNAi libraries (human, mouse, nematodes). The
platform is typically a part of scientific collaborations and its primary aim is to make possible the use of drugs in academic research for analysis of molecular mechanisms in disease and development. Besides supporting assay development, process automation, screening and automated data analysis, the Unit engages in the identification of novel screening technologies that may prove useful in its services. The Unit currently supports compound screening projects in assay development and optimization of High-Throughput Screening (HTS, Silke Radetzki), and in process automation (Martin Neuenschwander), including automated data documentation and analysis. Genome-wide RNAi screening (Katina Lazarow) has been established as a service complementing the identification of cellular targets through similar cellular phenotypes that have been generated either by compounds or RNA-interference. The Unit is building a central core facility for drug screening on the Campus Berlin-Buch for the Helmholtz-Initiative für Wirkstoffforschung, the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH), and EU-OPENSCREEN.