Matthew Christopher
Head of Chemical Biology Kiral Medicines
Matt is Head of Chemical Biology for Kiral Medicines, a startup focused on discovering better drugs through covalency. After spending 15 years at Merck Research Laboratories in roles across medicinal chemistry and later as founding member of the Merck Chemical Biology team, he joined Roivant Sciences to help build the foundation of Covant Therapeutics. During his 5 year tenure at Covant, Matt helped to build the covalent hit-finding engine, co-lead the development and design of Covant’s covalent library, developed methods to enable proteome-wide kinetic profiling of H2L molecules, and acted as the chemistry lead for multiple lead finding programs.
Seminars
As covalent programs mature, early warhead design decisions increasingly determine whether compounds progress or stall during translation. This workshop will examine how chemistry choices interact with PK/PD behavior, developability constraints and translational expectations, helping teams design warheads that remain viable through optimization and into IND enabling studies.
This session will address:
• Exploring non-acrylamide chemotypes and beyond to evaluate how alternative warhead chemistries electrophiles, alongside electrophile choice, placement, and scaffold context drive covalent engagement and selectivity
• Leveraging chemoproteomics and cellular covalent screening to profile target engagement and proteome-wide reactivity, enabling data-driven optimization and prioritization of warhead strategies
• Learning from real-world case studies, including deprioritized programs to uncover key pitfalls, unexpected liabilities, and transferable insights that improve decision making and reduce late-stage risk
