"In early 2017, John Tallarico and his team at Novartis started keeping tabs on intriguing research bubbling up in a handful of academic labs. Chemical biologists were reporting advances in a method for finding nooks and crannies on proteins for tethering drugs. They had real-world examples of how the technique, which uses chemical probes to map out binding pockets on proteins, could be used to tackle bad actors that have long vexed medicinal chemists.
One particularly rich vein of work was in the labs of Daniel Nomura, a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. Nomura had already collaborated a bit with Novartis, and he soon found himself talking to Tallarico, the head of chemical biology at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, about how to expand the relationship."