ORI Seminar

You are invited to a seminar presentation by Prof Ngwenya and Dr. Ian Tietjen from theUniversity of British Columbia on Monday at 0900 AM in the seminar room.

The seminar is entitled: “Antiviral discovery from pure natural products and traditional medicines”.

Find below Dr Ian Tietjen’s biosketch

Dr. Ian Tietjen is an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University and a Research Associate in the Department of Anaesthesiology, Pharmacology, and Therapeutics at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. He combines genetics, cell biology, drug discovery, and pharmacology to discover new antivirals and characterize antiviral targets, particularly for influenza and HIV. His current research aims to understand the properties of viroporins, or virally-encoded ion channels, and identify small molecules that inhibit them. He is also working to characterize antivirals for HIV and influenza that are derived from pure natural products and extracts with support from traditional medicines.

Dr. Tietjen received his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 2003 under the supervision of Dr. Catherine Dulac, where he developed a novel method to isolate and compare the microarray profiles of single olfactory neurons and their precursors. His postdoctoral training took place from 2003-06 with Dr. Christopher A. Walsh at Harvard Medical School, where he made use of emerging human genomics data, linkage analyses of human pedigrees, and cell culture techniques to identify and characterize novel genes that underlie cerebral cortex patterning, mental retardation, and epilepsy.

In 2006, Dr. Tietjen joined Xenon Pharmaceuticals Inc. in Vancouver as a Senior Research Scientist. There, he designed and implemented a research program where he sequenced 458 candidate genes of cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk in 200 individuals with familial forms of extremely high or low HDL cholesterol levels, leading to the discovery of 13 new genes that underlie CVD risk. In 2011, he joined CardiomePharma Corp. as a Group Leader, where he built a cell and molecular biology lab and was responsible for in vitro assay development, team supervision, and independent research. In 2012, Dr. Tietjen returned to academia under the guidance of Drs. David Fedida, Zabrina Brumme, and Mark Brockman to pursue his current projects to target viroporins and explore natural products as antivirals.