Bruce Koch
Head of High-Throughput Screening, Stanford ChEM-H
Bruce obtained his PhD at Harvard Medical School working on GPCR signaling mechanisms. He did a postdoc in Randy Schekman’s lab at UC Berkeley working on the role of heat shock proteins in protein secretion. He then spent 19 years in the pharmaceutical industry, working first at Syntex and then at Roche. During that time, he had a series of roles with increasing responsibility and became Director of Discovery Technologies for the Roche Palo Alto Site and Global Coordinator of High Throughput Screening. He began his career at Syntex developing and running in vitro assays to support Lead Optimization. After that he spent 6 years working to discover selective voltage-gated sodium channel blockers for the treatment of neuropathic pain. After that, he joined the HTS Group as an assay developer and later headed the high throughput screening group while also leading a program to discover ion channel blockers to treat MS. Since 2010, he has been an Advisor to the Stanford SPARK Program and since 2011 has been responsible for the shared scientific facilities in the School of Medicine. In 2020 he also joined ChEM-H as Head of the ChEM-H / Chemical and Systems Biology High Throughput Screening Knowledge Center.