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Stephanie Florio, PhD
Senior Scientist
Stephanie Florio is a Senior Scientist in the TB Drug
Discovery Group at IDRI.
Stephanie's work at IDRI is primarily focused on identifying and studying enzymes that are critical to the survival of the global pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis. In the earliest phase of drug discovery, new compounds with the potential to become antibiotics can be identified using high throughput assays to detect inhibition of enzymes which are essential to bacterial survival. As part of this effort, she is developing high throughput assays to measure enzymatic activity, and using these assays to screen chemical libraries to find inhibitors of these proteins. Such compounds can be used to understand bacterial physiology and can serve as good starting compounds for TB drug discovery.
Her current work focuses on enzymes that are required for bacterial survival and includes:
- LepB - a protease that acts as a gatekeeper for proteins destined for export or secretion from the bacteria
- IspC - an essential enzyme in the mevalonate-independent pathway, present in M. tuberculosis, but not in humans.
Prior to joining IDRI, she worked in the biopharmaceutical industry for over 12 years leading and contributing to projects focused on inflammation, chronic neuropathic pain and infectious deisease. she served as a R&D trainer for the research staff at Amgen - developing and implementing projects and workshops focused on small and large molecule drug development.
Stephanie received her BA degree in Biology from Austin
College in Sherman, Texas. In graduate school, she studied
with Dr. Joe Beavo in the field of phophodiesterases. She was
awarded my PhD from the Department of Pharmacology at
the University of Washington School Of Medicine.
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