Johanna Maria "Hanneke" Jansen is a computational chemist working at Novartis on multiple drug targets. She previously worked at Astra and at Chiron Corporation.[1]
Education
Jansen received her doctoral degree from the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) in 1995, studying computational medicinal chemistry. Her dissertation topic[2] concerned 3D modeling of the melatonin receptor, including work on synthesizing and separating analytes[3][4] to probe its chemistry. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Uppsala University in 1997. Her work there related to modeling receptor interactions[5] of drug leads to judge their serotonergic or dopaminergic activities.
Research
Much of Jansen's oeuvre uses in silico methods to study receptor biology, drug design, and drug-protein interactions. An early study (2000) while she was employed at Chiron looked at conformations of the anti-cancer treatment Taxol in nonpolar environments.[6]
In a 2012 commentary for Future Medicinal Chemistry, Jansen led a team of distinguished computational chemists in a call to action, namely that standardized data sets be used across the industry, and that sharing program code between groups at different companies and institutions should be mandated.[7]
A 2017 open-access study in PLoS One related some of Novartis' work - spearheaded by Jansen - to study the oncogenic protein RAS through inhibitors that targeted its inactive conformations.[8]
Volunteer service
Jansen has served the ACS division on Computers in Chemistry since at least 2007, holding multiple leadership positions.[9][10] Outside of pharmaceutical work, she is perhaps best known as a co-Founder and Steering Committee member for the Teach-Discover-Treat initiative,[11] which creates challenges for students and young professionals to design drugs against neglected diseases such as malaria or Trypanosoma using computational chemistry shared data sets and screens.
^Jansen, Johanna M.; Copinga, Swier; Gruppen, Gert; Isaksson, Roland; Witte, Dirk T.; Grol, Cor J. (1994). "Semipreparative enantiomeric separation of a series of putative melatonin receptor agents using tri-acetylcellulose as chiral stationary phase". Chirality. 6 (7): 596–604. doi:10.1002/chir.530060714. ISSN0899-0042. PMID7986673.
^Witte, Dirk T.; Bruggeman, Frank J.; Franke, Jan Piet; Copinga, Swier; Jansen, Johanna M.; De Zeeuw, Rokus A. (1993). "Comparison between cellulose and amylose tris(3,5-dimethylphenylcarbamate) chiral stationary phases for enantiomeric separation of 17 amidotetralins". Chirality. 5 (7): 545–553. doi:10.1002/chir.530050711. ISSN0899-0042.
^Hedberg, Martin H.; Linnanen, Tero; Jansen, Johanna M.; Nordvall, Gunnar; Hjorth, Stephan; Unelius, Lena; Johansson, Anette M. (January 1996). "11-Substituted (R)-Aporphines: Synthesis, Pharmacology, and Modeling of D2Aand 5-HT1AReceptor Interactions". Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. 39 (18): 3503–3513. doi:10.1021/jm960189i. ISSN0022-2623. PMID8784448.
