Evert Njomen Wants to Speed Up Drug Discovery

Evert Njomen doesn’t want to waste time. 

The new assistant professor of Chemistry and HHMI Hanna Gray Faculty Fellow identifies potential drug targets by employing a time-saving method and proteome-wide approach pioneered by her postdoc supervisor, Benjamin Cravatt at the Scripps Research Institute. 

The approach the Njomen Lab uses allows drugs to be discovered in native systems, like cell cultures or animal models, as opposed to the traditional method of purifying a single protein target and screening millions of compounds to find the one that could alter its function — turning it on or off, for example. “Not all proteins behave well in purified systems,” Njomen said. “You might run into the problem of it not translating when you introduce the compound into a native system.” In other words, you’ve spent a lot of time and money researching a drug that won’t work. 

The potential of discovering life-altering therapies is exciting to Njomen, who majored in biochemistry with plans to attend medical school in the United States. 

Originally from Cameroon, Njomen was a first-generation college student. “Growing up, I didn’t have much guidance as far as education was concerned,” she said, “but my strength in the sciences naturally led me on that path.” 

After college, and in order to fulfill requirements for medical school, she enrolled in a master's program in chemistry at Eastern Michigan University. “At the same time, I was continuing to do research. While waiting on medical school admission, I spent my summer working in Jetze Tepe’s lab at Michigan State University. When I got my medical school acceptance, I realized I was more excited about the science I was doing!” 

It was an enzyme called the proteasome, “this big enzyme that works like a garbage disposal within cells,” that led Njomen into a Ph.D. program at Michigan State University. "That’s where my drug discovery career started.” 

Just like a garbage disposal, the proteasome rests in a closed, inactive state. When waste builds up in your system, especially in the brain, it could lead to disorders like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. “We were looking for ways to make this system active, to clear those garbage proteins from diseased cells,” Njomen said. “From there, the next question was how to go beyond doing drug discovery on a single target at a time versus broadly looking at an entire system.” 

When you do your screening in an entire cell system, as she learned to do at Scripps and will continue in her lab at Duke, you can see the overall target profile of a compound at an early stage in your research. “Then you have the option of deciding whether or not this would be a good compound to go after based on how broadly it's hitting everything in the cell,” she said. 

For Njomen, the challenge is narrowing the gap between proteins that may have relevance to human disorders and those that are currently targeted by FDA-approved drugs. “The gap between those two is still very big,” she said, “and most of these protein targets are in the class that needs to be studied in their native environment. We’re hoping that by exploring new areas of chemistry, we may be able to uncover new small molecule leads and druggable pockets in these disease-relevant proteins.” 

In addition to Njomen, the department of Chemistry is also welcoming Assistant Professor Edwin Alfonzo to the faculty this year. 

"The addition of Professors Evert Njomen and Edwin Alfonzo increases our department's footprint in chemical biology and organic synthesis,” said Michael Fitzgerald, chair of the department. “Evert’s passion for chemical biology is infectious! Her exciting new ideas and experimental approaches in the area of chemoproteomics will fuel the discovery of new drugs to treat human diseases from cancer to inflammatory disorders. I can’t wait to see all the exciting new research that comes out of these new labs."