Chilton Lectures
Arthur L. Chilton and the A.L. Chilton Foundation have been instrumental to the success of the Department of Biochemistry at UT Southwestern Medical Center.
Mr. Chilton was the founder of Sky Broadcasting System, with radio stations broadcasting from Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Mr. Chilton also was an active and very generous philanthropist, creating the Chilton Foundation in 1945 to support medical research, youth organizations, and other charities.\
He began supporting UT Southwestern biochemistry students in the 1950s because of an interest in lipid metabolism and research related to obesity. That grew into a sustained and long-term commitment to support the Department of Biochemistry.
Mr. Chilton died in 1973, but through his close friend, the late T. Andrew Bell, and subsequently his widow, Mar Nell, and daughters, Bonnie Harding and Pattie Brown, his legacy as a forward-thinking benefactor continues at UT Southwestern Medical Center.
2019 Chilton Lecture
Title: "Attacking the Surfaceome of Cancer Cells"
Time/Date: 4 p.m. April 17, 2019
Location: Excellence in Education Foundation Auditorium
Simmons Biomedical Research Building
About Dr. Wells
Jim pioneered the engineering of proteins, antibodies, and small molecules that target catalytic, allosteric, and protein-protein interaction sites; and technologies including protein phage display, alanine-scanning, engineered proteases for improved hydrolysis, bioconjugations, N-terminomics, disulfide "tethering" (a novel site-directed fragment based approach for drug discovery), and more recently an industrialized recombinant antibody production pipeline for the proteome. These lead to important new insights into protease mechanisms, growth factor signaling, hot-spots in protein-protein interfaces, role of caspases in biology, and more recently determining how cell surfaces change in health and disease. His team was integral to several protein products including Somavert for acromegaly, Avastin for cancer, and engineered proteases sold by Pfizer, Genentech and Genencor, respectively. He is an elected member of the US National Academy of Science, American Association of Arts and Science, and the National Academy of Inventors.