Drew Adams Email & Phone Number

After being introduced to research in both biology and chemistry as a Biochemistry major at Swarthmore College, I pursued my PhD in Chemistry with Dave Evans at Harvard, where I focused on total synthesis of alkaloid natural products. My postdoctoral years within Stuart Schreiber’s group at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT were spent not in a chemical fume hood but in a biosafety cabinet, where I learned a wide range of cell-based assay approaches and found my passion for identifying therapeutic targets that spur drug discovery efforts.Building on my interdisciplinary training, I launched my lab at Case Western Reserve University in 2015, and in 2017 I was appointed the Thomas F. Peterson, Jr. Professor of Novel Therapeutics. In 2018 my lab published in Nature our work establishing novel targets within the cholesterol pathway whose inhibition drives oligodendrocyte formation and remyelination, a cutting-edge therapeutic approach for multiple sclerosis and other diseases of myelin. Remarkably, this mechanism accounts for an overwhelming majority of enhancers of oligodendrocyte formation published in the field. While my lab at CWRU has continued to innovate in the chemical biology of myelin, I have also been active in pushing these new insights toward patients with diseases of myelin. In 2017 I founded Convelo Therapeutics, and in 2018 I joined Convelo as VP of Discovery while maintaining my CWRU duties. In 2019 Convelo launched a research collaboration agreement with Genentech, and since 2020 I have served as Convelo’s Project Team Co-Lead, guiding our team of 15 and leading our interactions with Genentech. Back at CWRU, the Adams Lab (www.drewadamslab.com) continues its dive into the sterol signaling controlling oligodendrocyte formation while also expanding into immunology- and cancer-focused projects. Uniting these projects is my central goal of identifying novel therapeutic targets and advancing small-molecule modulators of these targets toward patients.