Steven Ballet

Dr. Steven Ballet completed his PhD with promotor Prof. Dirk Tourwé at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB, Brussels, Belgium) in 2007. During his PhD formation, he was submerged in the magical world of peptides and peptidomimetics and specialized in the synthesis of conformationally constrained amino acids. Directly following his PhD training, Dr Ballet went for a first postdoctoral stay in Australia at the University of Adelaide with Professor Andrew Abell. At the UofA, he applied ring closing and cross metathesis reactions on amino acid and peptide substrates. As such, dimeric but also ring closed peptide scaffolds could be obtained. More specifically, RCM was used to stabilize ('staple') the helical conformation of alpha and beta peptides. As a second postdoctoral training, Dr. Ballet went to the Institut de Recherches Cliniques de Montréal (IRCM, Montreal, Canada) for a specialized training in the opioid peptide field. Together with Prof. Peter W. Schiller, he designed bifunctional opioid ligands with dual MOR/DOR agonist profiles and hybrid opioid/non-opioid multitarget ligands. Since 2010 Dr. Ballet is appointed as a faculty member at his alma mater, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he pursues his efforts in the peptide and peptidomimetic field. Main research themes include synthetic organic methodology with focus heterocyclic compounds intended for Medicinal Chemistry purposes, peptide and protein epitope mimicry, and soft materials for regenerative medicine and controlled-drug release applications.