Speaker Bios

Jerry L. Adams, Ph.D., Director, Medicinal Chemistry, Immuno-Oncology & Combinations DPU, GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals

Jerry earned a doctorate in Chemistry (UC Berkeley, 1984). He worked initially on transition-state analog and suicide enzyme inhibitors. In 1992, his group discovered the first selective inhibitors of p38α. Subsequently, he led kinase inhibitor programs for Tie2, BRAF, MEK, and FAK. Jerry currently leads discovery chemistry for immuno-oncology at GlaxoSmithKline.

Jonathan B. Baell, Ph.D., Director, Australian Translational Medicinal Chemistry Laboratory and Professor, Medicinal Chemistry, Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Science, Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences

Dr. Baell has almost 25 years of medicinal chemistry experience in the public-private interface. He has more than 40 granted patents, representing 25 separate pharmaceutical inventions, many of which are licensed and alive. These include compounds currently in clinical development. In 2005 he was awarded the 2004 Biota Medal, a National Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry for an early to mid-career researcher. He has published 40 papers since 2009, including entries in Nature, Nature Chemical Biology and several in Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. He set up Australia’s main HTS libraries during 2003-2010 and derived from this experience, his 2010 HTS publication on Pan Assay Interference Compounds, or PAINS, and has been most highly cited primary research article in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry over a 3-year period. His current interests are in the design of quality of HTS libraries, medicinal chemistry hit-to-lead and lead optimization, and computer-aided peptidomimetic design in order to generate compounds with potential therapeutic utility and of value to treat diseases with unmet medical needs. He is on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry and is also a Senior Editor of Future Medicinal Chemistry.

David Bauer, Principal Scientist, Head of Medicinal Chemistry Outsourcing, Amgen

Dr. Bauer joined Amgen in November 2003. He currently leads Amgen Discovery Chemistry outsourcing efforts and Amgen custom synthesis group. Prior to this, he held positions in medicinal chemistry at Amgen. Dr. Bauer graduated from Ecole Superieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielles (Paris, France). He obtained a Ph.D. from Universite Paris VI in organic chemistry and was a post-doctoral fellow at University of Pennsylvania.

Makonen Belema, Ph.D., Senior Principal Scientist, Discovery Chemistry, Bristol Myers Squibb Co.

Makonen Belema received a B.A. in Chemistry from Swarthmore College, PA, and a Ph.D. in Synthetic Organic Chemistry from Yale University, CT, under the mentorship of Professor F. E. Ziegler before joining Bristol-Myers Squibb in 1996. Early in his industrial career, he worked on a retinoid and an IKK project as part of a broader effort directed at the treatment of dermatological and immunological disorders, respectively. His work over the past decade has focused on the exploration of novel HCV inhibitors targeting the NS5A protein, the most noteworthy result of which include the discovery of daclatasvir.

Barry Bunin, Ph.D., CEO, Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD, Inc)

Barry A. Bunin, Ph.D. is the CEO of Collaborative Drug Discovery. Prior to CDD, Dr. Bunin was an Entrepreneur in Residence with Eli Lilly & Co. Dr. Bunin is on a patent for Kyprolis™ (carfilzomib) for Injection, a proteasome inhibitor that received accelerated FDA approval for the treatment of patients with multiple myeloma. Dr. Bunin was the founding CEO, President, & CSO of Libraria (now Eidogen-Sertanty). At Libraria, Dr. Bunin led a team that integrated exhaustive reaction capture (synthetic chemistry) with gene-family wide SAR capture (medicinal chemistry). On the scientific side, he co-authored “Chemoinformatics: Theory, Practice, and Products” (Springer-Verlag), a text that overviews modern chemoinformatics technologies, and “The Combinatorial Index” (Academic Press), a widely used text on high-throughput chemical synthesis. In the lab, Dr. Bunin did medicinal synthetic chemistry developing patented new chemotypes for protease inhibition at Axys Pharmaceuticals (now Celera) and RGD mimics to inhibit GP-IIbIIIa at Genentech. Dr. Bunin received his B.A. from Columbia University and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, where he synthesized and tested the initial 1,4-benzodiazepine libraries with Professor Jonathan Ellman.

Mark Bunnage, D.Phil., Vice President, Head, Chemistry, Biotherapeutics Research, Pfizer, Inc.

Mark studied Chemistry at the University of Durham, graduating in 1990. Mark then undertook his postgraduate studies with Professor S G Davies at the University of Oxford, followed by a move to The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California to work with Professor K C Nicolaou as a NATO postdoctoral fellow.

In 1996, Mark returned to the UK to join Pfizer as a medicinal chemist in their research laboratories in Sandwich, Kent, UK. During his career at Pfizer, Mark has had a number of roles of increasing responsibility and in November 2010 became Executive Director, Head of Medicinal Chemistry, Sandwich Laboratories. In April 2011, Mark was appointed Vice President, Head of Chemistry, Biotherapeutics Research at Pfizer and is now based in Cambridge, MA.

Mark has broad interests in Drug Discovery, is an author or inventor on over 50 publications and patents, and is Editor of the RSC book ‘New Frontiers in Chemical Biology’. Mark is a member of the editorial board of MedChemComm and is an external advisor for chemistry at King’s College, London. Mark also serves on the board of directors for the Structural Genomics Consortium.

Byron DeLaBarre, Ph.D., President & Chief Scientist,The Consulting Biochemist, LLC

Byron completed his Ph.D. in Biochemistry at McMaster University studying aspartic acid pathways. As a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Axel Brunger at Stanford where his efforts led to a deeper understanding of the recognition of misfolded proteins at the ER-cytosol interface and the modulation of membrane fusion events in neurons. He began in industry as a scientist in the structural biology group at Takeda-Millennium. Most recently he was the head of structural biology at Agios where he supported all of their preclinical projects and helped to bring 3 novel drugs to the clinic during his tenure there. Currently he serves the drug discovery industry with his company, “The Consulting Biochemist”.

José Duca, Ph.D., Global Head, Computer-Aided Drug Discovery, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, Inc.

Born in Argentina, José Duca received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the National University of Córdoba. He moved to the United States where he joined Prof. Tony Hopfinger’s group in the College of Pharmacy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. After 2.5 winters as a postdoctoral fellow, José joined the Schering-Plough Research Institute in Kenilworth, New Jersey; where he had increasing responsibilities in the CADD group for 10 years. Schering-Plough became Merck in late 2009, two weeks after Novartis and José started “talking”. José moved to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in April 2010, where he is the Head of the Computer-Aided Drug Discovery group at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research in Cambridge, MA. His scientific fields of expertise within computational chemistry include – but are not limited to – molecular modeling, ab initio calculations, molecular recognition, QM-MM methods and structure-based drug design.

 Stewart L. Fisher, Ph.D., Principal, SL Fisher Consulting, LLC

Dr. Fisher has more than 17 years of industry experience and was most recently the Executive Director of the Infection Bioscience Department, AstraZeneca Infectious Disease Innovative Medicines Unit based in Waltham, MA. Dr. Fisher received his PhD in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1993. After a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School working on mechanisms of antibiotic resistance under the direction of Professor Christopher T. Walsh, he spent two years at Hoffmann LaRocheworking on obesity drug discovery research. In 1998, he returned to the Boston area to join AstraZeneca in the Infection Discovery Unit. During his 15 year tenure at AstraZeneca, he led several drug discovery projects that delivered candidates to Phase I clinical trials and ultimately supervised the Bioscience activities ranging from target identification to pharmacodynamic studies supporting clinical candidates. Dr. Fisher is now Principal at SL Fisher Consulting, LLC providing strategic advice to in the areas of Infection Discovery and quantitative biochemistry. He has Visiting Scientist appointments at Stony Brook University and The Broad Institute and is a member of the Executive Council for The Protein Society.

Paul Greenspan, Senior Director, Discovery Chemistry, Takeda Boston

Paul Greenspan is responsible for medicinal chemistry, structural biology, computational chemistry and high-throughput screening at Takeda’s Cambridge, US site. He has been a member of the oncology therapeutic area at Takeda (formerly Millennium) for the past 11 years. Prior to Takeda, Dr. Greenspan worked as a medicinal chemist at Novartis, in the areas of arthritis and inflammation. He obtained his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Duke University, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the lab of Professor Barry Trost at Stanford University.

Michelle Lynn Hall, Ph.D., Senior Applications Scientist, Schrödinger

Michelle Lynn Hall, Senior Applications Scientist, joined Schrodinger in 2013. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University where she developed a novel density functional and employed DFT to study various practical applications, ranging from materials science to biological mechanisms of action. She then completed a postdoc at Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research joint with Prof. Jorgensen at Yale University, where she developed a novel protocol to predict binding to human serum albumin. She has authored papers on density functional methods in addition to cheminformatics, ligand- and structure-based drug design.

 Pamela Hill, Open Innovation Program Manager, Emerging Innovations, AstraZeneca, R&D Boston

Pam is an experienced medicinal chemist spending the past 12 years in the Infection Chemistry group at AstraZeneca leading several early stage projects targeting novel treatments for viral and Gram negative bacterial infections. She is currently involved in exploring new collaboration models through the AstraZeneca Open Innovation program.

Joerg Holenz, Ph.D., Director, Discovery & Preclinical Sciences, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals

Joerg is a trained Organic and Medicinal Chemist and acquired his Ph.D. in Germany on the synthesis of alkaloids as antimalarial agents. He started his professional career in 1998 as Process Chemist at Grunenthal Pharmaceuticals in Germany, leading the preclinical activities of the later marketed analgesic Tapentadol. From 2003 to 2006, he headed the Medicinal Chemistry Department of Barcelona-based Laboratorios Esteve. In 2006, Joerg joined AstraZeneca’s CNS/PainResearch Unit in Sodertalje, Sweden, as a Project Leader, and later headed the Lead Generation Section within the Medicinal Chemistry Department. In 2012, Jorg was selected to join the newly formed ‘virtual’ Neuroscience Unit in Boston as Project Director, and in this role is responsible for pioneering a novel concept of driving Research and Development via increased use of academic and industry collaborative networks. In his career, Joerg worked predominantly with peripheral and central targets in the Pain/Neuroscience disease areas, where hedelivered several clinical candidates (e.g. Rosonabant, E-6199, E-52862, or AZD3839). Joerg has edited, authored or contributed to more than 45 publications, 50 patent applications and several books and book chapters.

Matt Lucas, Ph.D., Director, Medicinal Chemistry, Discovery Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Research, Cubist Pharmaceuticals

Matt Lucas, born and raised in England, received his degrees in Chemistry and Biochemistry and his Ph.D. in organic synthesis at the University of Southampton. After moving to the USA to complete post-doctoral training at Florida State University, he took his first industrial position in the Medicinal Chemistry group at Roche Palo Alto, CA, working first in virology and later in neurological diseases. He spent a yearlong sabbatical at Hoffmann-La Roche in Switzerland working on additional CNS indications, then returned to the US to work on inflammation targets. In 2012 Matt joined Cubist Pharmaceuticals in Lexington, MA, where he is currently Director of Medicinal Chemistry. In 2015, Cubist became a wholly owned subsidiary of Merck. Matt has worked in multiple therapy areas, including anti-infectives, immunology, pain and CNS, and on various target classes including RNA polymerases, ion channels, and kinases. In his spare time, Matt fulfills his role as Associate Editor of the European Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.

Robert Pearlstein, Ph.D., Senior Investigator, Global Discovery Chemistry, Computer-Aided Drug Discovery, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, Inc.

Robert Pearlstein received his MSE in 1981 and Ph.D. in 1983 in Macromolecular
 Science and Engineering from Case Western Reserve University under A.J. Hopfinger. He began his career as a Research Investigator in the Drug Design Group at G.D. Searle in Skokie IL. He departed Searle in 1985 to become the Vice-President and founding partner of Chemlab, Inc. in Lake Forest IL, where he continued developing the Chemlab-II computational chemistry software package that he had co-authored in graduate school (licensed during his tenure by over 50 pharmaceutical, chemical, and academic customers worldwide). Robert joined the Computational Biology group at the NIH in Bethesda MD in 1991, and went on to found the Center for Molecular Modeling there in 1995 (housed in the Laboratory of Structural Biology under V. Adrian Parsegian). He served as the CMM Section Chief until 1998, and then once again headed for pharma as a Senior Principal Scientist in the CADD group at Hoechst Marion Roussel in Bridgewater, NJ (later becoming Aventis and Sanofi-Aventis). He joined the CADD group at Novartis in Cambridge MA in 2005, where he is currently a Senior Research Investigator. In 2010, Robert proposed a novel theory linking kinetic binding barriers to solvation and resolvation energies, and subsequently co-authored four peer reviewed publications on this subject (with two manuscripts in preparation). He has co-authored two additional works on solvation theory (one in press, and one submitted), and co-chaired the New England Structural Biology Association conference on Protein-Ligand Thermodynamics and Kinetics: Building Bridges Between In Silico and Biophysical Realms in 2012. Robert has contributed extensively to understanding the mechanisms of blockade of the hERG potassium channel, and has co-authored three articles on this subject in peer reviewed journals, as well as one submitted article, and two book chapters (''Progress in Cardiac Arrhythmia Research'', Nova Publishers 2008, and “Antitargets and Drug Safety, Wiley, 2015). He has co-authored nearly 40 publications on a wide range of topics throughout his career.

Renato Skerlj, Ph.D., Vice President, Drug Discovery and Preclinical Development, Lysosomal Therapeutics, Inc.

Renato has over 20 years of pharmaceutical experience in the discovery and development of small molecule drugs to treat cancer, infection and rare diseases resulting in two marketed drugs. These include Invanz, an anti-infective approved in 2004 and Mozobil, a stem cell mobilizer used in autologous transplants and approved in 2008. Most recently he was the Head of Small Molecule Discovery at Genzyme. Prior to joining Genzyme he was part of the executive team at AnorMED as Vice President of Chemistry. He was an inventor and played a key role in the successful development of Mozobil resulting in the acquisition of AnorMED in late 2006 by Genzyme for $600 million. Prior to joining AnorMED he held research positions at Merck and Johnson Matthey in the US. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in synthetic organic chemistry and completed postdoctoral training at Oxford University and Ohio State University. He is the author of 62 publications and inventor of 32 patents.

Alexander Statsyuk, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Chemistry Department, Northwestern University

Alexander V. Statsyuk graduated from the Moscow State University, Russia in 1998, with the BS degree in chemistry. Subsequently, Alexander moved to the USA in January of 2001 to pursue his Ph.D. studies at the University of Chicago under the direction of Prof. Sergey A. Kozmin, where he worked on the total synthesis and target identification of the cytotoxic natural product bistramide A, followed by postdoctoral work with Prof. Kevan Shokat (UCSF). Since 2010, Alexander V. Statsyuk has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University, where he directs his independent research program aimed at studying the ubiquitin-proteasome system. Alexander is a recipient of 2012 Pew Scholar Award.

Atli Thorarensen, Ph.D., Research Fellow, BioTx Medicinal Chemistry, Pfizer

Dr. Thorarensen is a research fellow in BioTx medicinal chemistry working in the Immunoscience research unit at Pfizer. In the past he has lead medicinal projects in several therapeutic areas including anti-infective, allergy and respiratory, pain and inflammation. In the past few years his focus has been design of irreversible inhibitors as therapeutic targets for inflammation. Dr. Thorarensen received his BS in chemistry from University of Iceland and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from University of Illinois. He is the author of 47 publications and 24 patents.

Philip N. Tsichlis, M.D., Jane F. Desforges Professor of Medicine, Tufts University School of Medicine

Following graduation from the Medical School of the University of Athens, Philip trained in internal medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and in Hematology at Tufts Medical Center. During his hematology training, under the guidance of inspiring teachers such as Drs. Robert Schwartz and Jane Desforges, Philip became interested in the biology of hematologic neoplasms. To pursue this interest, he did a postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. John Coffin at Tufts University School of Medicine. Philip's first independent lab was at the National Cancer Institute, and after moves to the Fox Chase and Kimmel Cancer Centers, he returned to Tufts Medical Center in September 2002 to head the Molecular Oncology Research Institute. His laboratory has trained more than 50 students and postdoctoral fellows who are now pursuing independent scientific careers in the United States and Europe.

Malcolm Whitman, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Developmental Biology, Harvard School of Dental Medicine; Department of Cell Biology, Harvard Medical School

Malcolm Whitman received his undergraduate degree in Biology from Yale College and his Ph.D. from the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department at Harvard University. His thesis work in the lab of Lew Cantley investigated the association of phosphatidylinositol kinases with oncogene and growth factor receptor tyrosine kinases, and culminated in the discovery of the phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase signal transduction pathway. In his postdoctoral work with Doug Melton, he developed the frog embryo as a tool for studying mechanisms of growth factor signaling during early development. Dr. Whitman is a Professor of Developmental Biology at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine and an affiliate member of the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School. He is a member of the BBS graduate program, an affiliate of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, the Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Center Cancer Cell Biology Program and a member of the executive committee for the Harvard Developmental and Regenerative Biology program.