Michelle Arkin

Michelle Arkin is a chemical biologist who left the University of California, San Francisco, where she chaired the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, to join the University of Toronto as the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair of Canada in Chemical Biology.

Arkin earned her BA in chemistry from Bryn Mawr College and her PhD in chemistry at Caltech under Jacqueline Barton. She was a founding scientist at Sunesis Pharmaceuticals, where she helped discover the anti-inflammatory drug lifitegrast and the cancer therapeutic vosaroxin. At UCSF, her research focused on developing medicines for diseases once considered too difficult to treat, contributing to an FDA-approved treatment for dry eye disease.

Arkin's research targets a longstanding problem in drug discovery: many disease-linked proteins offer no obvious binding site for small-molecule drugs, leaving important diseases without viable medicines. Over nearly three decades, she has developed the chemical strategies, screening technologies, and translational infrastructure needed to turn these previously "undruggable" proteins into legitimate starting points for new therapies, opening entire new classes of targets to drug discovery.

She has since founded four biotechnology companies spanning oncology, neurodegeneration, inflammation, and liver disease, describing her focus as building the infrastructure and culture needed to make excellent drug discovery possible at scale, and calling that entrepreneurial approach a model she hopes to bring to Canada's biomedical innovation ecosystem. Her work has produced drugs now used by patients, companies actively developing new medicines, and a generation of trainees who now lead their own research programs in academia and industry.