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Nicholas Meanwell, Ph.D., Executive Director, Department of Chemistry, Research and Development, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.
Dr. Meanwell is Currently Executive Director, Department of Discovery Chemistry, Virology at Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. He has led drug discovery programs in the cardiovascular, neurosciences and virology therapeutic areas, work that has resulted in the advancement of over 25 clinical candidates for the prevention of thrombosis, the treatment of stroke and therapy for viral infections, including human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepatitis C virus (HCV) and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Recent significant discoveries to emerge from this group include RSV fusion inhibitors, characterized as the first small molecules to interfere with the association of the 6 helical peptide bundle that is a critical step in the virus entry process, and a series of HIV attachment inhibitors that are the first small molecules described to function by interfering with the interaction between virus gp120 and the host cell CD4 receptor. BMS-663068, a phosphonooxymethyl prodrug of BMS-626529, is currently in Phase 2 clinical trials.Significant compounds in the HCV arena include daclatasvir, a pioneering molecule that established NS5A inhibition as a clinically-relevant target and which is currently in Phase 2 and 3 clinical trials, the HCV NS3 protease inhibitor asunaprevir which incorporates the cyclopropyl acylsulfonamide moiety that has been widely adopted, and BMS-791325, a thumb site inhibitor of HCV NS5B polymerase. The combination of daclatasvir and asunaprevir in a clinical trial conducted in HCV-infected subjects established for the first time that a HCV infection could be cured by direct acting antiviral agents in the absence of immune stimulation.
Dr. Meanwell has author/co-author of 130 peer-reviewed publications, 45 review articles and book chapters and more than 130 meeting abstracts. He is named as inventor/co-inventor of over 90 issued U.S. Patents and have presented over 50 invited lectures at National and International meetings, Universities and Schools on Medicinal Chemistry.
W. Patrick Walters, Ph.D., Principal Research Fellow, Group Head – Computational Sciences, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Pat Walters is a Principal Research Fellow at Vertex Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge Massachusetts where he has worked since 1995. He heads the Computational Sciences group, which encompasses molecular modeling, cheminformatics, bioinformatics, and scientific intelligence. Dr. Walters is a member of the editorial advisory boards for the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, Molecular Informatics, and Letters in Drug Design & Discovery. Before joining Vertex, Dr. Walters earned his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Arizona where he studied the application of artificial intelligence in conformational analysis. Prior to obtaining his Ph.D., he worked at Varian Instruments as both a chemist and a software developer. Dr. Walters received his B.S. in Chemistry from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Terry Richard Stouch, Ph.D., President, Science for Solutions, LLC
Dr. Terry Richard Stouch has 30 years’ experience in drug discovery research in large Pharmaceuticals and biotech. His specializations are drug design, molecular property prediction, molecular and biomolecular structure, computational sciences, pharmaceutical data evaluation and modeling, and scientific software design. He has participated in placing 8 compounds into human clinical trials. He has worked in most therapeutic areas including metabolic diseases, cardiovascular, oncology, anti-infective, immunology, and osteology. He consults for large and small pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, biomolecular and chemical database organizations, and chemical and biomolecular software companies, among others.
He is president of Science For Solutions, LLC, a consulting firm specializing in molecular and computational sciences; Senior Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Computer-Aided Molecular Design; and Adjunct Professor Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Duquesne University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). Previously he was Director, Computational Chemistry and Structural Biology at Lexicon Pharmaceuticals; Consultant at the Protein Data Bank; Adjunct Professor Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, School of Pharmacy, University of Kentucky; Principal Scientist in Macromolecular Structure and Computer-Aided Drug Design at Bristol-Myers Squibb; and an Office of Naval Technology Postdoctoral Fellow at the Naval Research Laboratory. Both his Ph.D. in chemistry with Professor Peters Jurs and B.S. in biochemistry were earned at the Pennsylvania State University. He is author of over 70 publications and has presented over 140 invited lectures.
Phil Cox, Ph.D., Principal Research Scientist, Discovery Chemistry and Technology, Global Pharmaceutical R&D, Abbvie, Inc.
Phil Cox began his industrial career in 1997 with Oxford Asymmetry International (now Evotec) where he was a Project Leader in the Discovery Services Division working on multiple collaborations in both the Pharmaceutical and Agrochemical sectors. Phil then moved to Pharmacia, Skokie, where he was a member of the Parallel Medicinal Chemistry Group before transferring to Ann Arbor as part of the Pfizer acquisition in 2003. In 2007, Phil moved to Abbott Labs (now AbbVie Inc.) where he is currently a Medicinal Chemistry Group Leader and Principal Research Scientist in the Hit to Lead Group. Phil is an inventor on numerous patents spanning multiple therapeutic areas and has published articles in the areas of property-based design, fragment-based drug discovery, and compound file management.
Li Di, Ph.D., Associate Research Fellow, Global Research and Development, Pfizer, Inc.
Dr. Li Di has about 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical indus¬try, including Pfizer, Wyeth and Syntex. She is currently an associate research fellow at Pfizer Global Research and Development. Her research interests include the areas of drug absorption, metabo¬lism, transporters, pharmacokinetics and dynamics, blood–brain barrier transport and drug solubility. She teaches an ACS short course on drug-like properties. She is a book author and has over 100 publications and presented over 60 invited lectures.
Michael A. Walker, Ph.D., Senior Principal Scientist, Department of Chemistry, Research and Development, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.
Sarah L. Price, Ph.D., Professor of Physical Chemistry, Department of Chemistry, University College London
Sally, officially Sarah, Price trained as a theoretical chemist at the University of Cambridge, specialising in deriving models of the forces between molecules from their wavefunctions. She worked at the Universities of Chicago and Cambridge, before becoming a lecturer at University College London, where she is now a Professor specialising in Computational Chemistry. Since 2004 she has lead a UK Research Council funded project, “Control and Prediction of the Organic Solid State”, www.cposs.org,uk which has been developing a computational method of polymorph prediction in collaboration with pharmaceutical solid state scientists in academia and industry. For her work on the computational modelling of polymorphism, she was awarded the 2005 Royal Society of Chemistry Industrially-Sponsored award in Statistical Mechanics and Simulation.
Patrick R. Connelly, Ph.D., Principal Scientific Fellow, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Patrick Connelly is a physical chemist with 23 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry with a research career emphasis on the thermodynamic control of biological macromolecules, organic materials chemistry, and science policy. He currently heads the Materials Discovery & Characterization department at Vertex Pharmaceuticals where he has worked for 9 years. He was among the founding scientists at Vertex in 1990 following postdoctoral work at Yale University and graduate work at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In between stints at Vertex, Patrick founded and served as Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer of Althexis Inc. where he was also a member of the Board of Directors, and founded and operated Synchrony Biosciences Inc. In 1995, he took a one year sabbatical from industry to teach general chemistry at a coeducational boarding school in central Massachusetts – The Groton School.
Harvey Lieberman, Ph.D., Senior Manager, Analytical Research & Development, Sanofi
Rebecca Nofsinger, Ph.D., Senior Research Pharmacist, Biopharmaceutics Group, Merck & Co., Inc
Becky Nofsinger is currently an Associate Principle Scientist in the Biopharmaceutics group at Merck. Her main work activities relate to oral biopharmaceutics focusing on supporting oral formulation development across various clinical development stages with an expertise at the discovery/development interface and prodrug development. Becky obtained her PhD degree in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of Kansas. She has authored/co-authored several research and review papers.
Steven LaPlante, Ph.D., Adjunct Professor, Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS) University; Founder & CEO, NMX Research & Solutions
Jan Wahlstrom, Ph.D., Director, Pharmacokinetics & Drug Metabolism, Amgen, Inc
Jan Wahlstrom received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Washington State University in 1998. Following postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Professor Jeffrey Jones at Washington State University, he joined Camitro, a leading ADME modeling company located in Menlo Park, CA. He subsequently held Staff Scientist positions at ArQule and Predictive Discovery that integrated his organic synthesis and ADME/PK expertise. Jan held a Principal Scientist role at Pfizer in St Louis, MO, where he supported the cardiovascular, inflammation and allergy/respiratory therapeutic areas. He is currently a Director at Amgen in Seattle, WA, supporting oncology and inflammation programs using small molecule and protein therapeutic platforms.
Darren McKerrecher, Ph.D., Associate Director, Medicinal Chemistry, Oncology iMED, AstraZeneca
Dr Darren McKerrecher obtained his Chemistry degree at Edinburgh (Scotland), and completed his PhD with Richard Taylor at York in 1997. He joined Zeneca, now AstraZeneca UK, as a medicinal chemist in 1997. He has been involved in a number of projects with ADMET challenges, in disease areas as diverse as cancer, diabetes, obesity, asthma and COPD, leading to multiple clinical candidates. Darren is co-author of more than 50 papers and patents and was recently elected as Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC). From 2006-2008, Darren undertook a secondment in AZ Lund (Sweden), before returning to Alderley Park where he is now Associate Director of Medicinal Chemistry and responsible for chemistry outsourcing in the Oncology iMED unit.
Alfin D.N. Vaz, Associate Research Fellow, Department of Pharmacokinetics, Dynamics and Metabolism, Pfizer, Inc.
Peter Fan, Ph.D., Scientist, DMPK, Genentech Inc.
Peter did his PhD work under the supervision of Professor Judy Bolton at University of Illinois at Chicago. His work probed the bioactivation mechanism of popular anti-breast cancer drug tamoxifen. He later pursued an industrial post-doc reporting to Dr. Jeff Stevens at Pharmacia where he designed experiments to understand the impact of intestinal metabolism to raloxifene. He has over 10 years of industrial experience in drug metabolism and supported numerous discovery projects in metabolic disorder, oncology, and immunology. He currently holds one US patent and has published over a dozen of papers in highly reputable journals including JACS, JOC, CRT, and DMD. For his outstanding work he has received awards from Experimental Biology Meeting in 2002, Amgen, and Applied Pharmaceutical Annual Meeting in 2013. He is currently leading the Discovery Metabolite Identification group at Genentech.
Arijit Chakravarty, Ph.D., Senior Scientist II, Modeling and Simulation, DMPK, Takeda Pharmaceuticals
I am a 'wet/dry' biologist in the Translational Oncology space. Over the course of my career, I have been a group leader for teams of cell biology, in vivo pharmacology, translational and mathematical modeling scientists. As a discovery project leader for seven molecules in early clinical development, I was responsible for the translational portion of the preclinical package.
My team is responsible for PK/PD modeling support to expedite drug discovery and development. A particular focus of our effort is in developing predictive ADME models, and in leveraging PK/PD/E modeling to facilitate the early-stage discovery process.
SHORT COURSE INSTRUCTORS
Susan M. Reutzel-Edens, Ph.D., MRSC, Senior Research Advisor, Small Molecule Design & Development, Eli Lilly and Company
She received her B.S. degree in Chemistry from Winona State University in 1987 and obtained her Ph.D. from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Minnesota in 1991 under the direction of the late Professor Margaret C. Etter. She joined Eli Lilly & Company in 1991, where she developed and now leads the comprehensive solid form screening effort, from which commercially-viable drug crystal forms are identified. Her research interests now include 1) crystal polymorphism, 2) crystal engineering, 3) crystallization of small-molecule drug crystal forms (polymorphs/solvates), 4) the integration of SSNMR spectroscopy, thermal analysis, X ray diffraction, microscopy, moisture sorption analysis, and molecular and crystal modeling, for their identification and characterization, and 5) the elucidation of structure-property (stability, solubility, intrinsic dissolution rate, etc…) relationships. She is a Topic Editor for Crystal Growth and Design and serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences.
Denette Murphy, Ph.D., Principal Scientist, Drug Product Science and Technology, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.
Dr. Murphy received her Ph. D. in Pharmaceutics from the University of Michigan. She has over 15 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry in various organizations supporting early drug discovery, preformulation and formulation development. She is currently a Principal Scientist in the Materials Science group at Bristol-Myers Squibb Company. Her professional interests include thermodynamic stability/mechanisms of crystal form transformations, crystallization, crystal engineering, and excipient-drug interactions.