Gerhard Ecker, Editor-in-chief
University of Vienna, Austria
Gerhard received his doctorate in natural sciences from the University of Vienna and performed his post-doctoral training at the group of J. Seydel in Borstel (Germany).
Gerhard Ecker is a Professor for Pharmacoinformatics and Head of the Pharmacoinformatics Research Group at the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, University of Vienna. He also coordinates the research focus “Computational Life Sciences” of the Faculty of Life Sciences.
His main research interests are ligand- and structure-based drug design with focus on transmembrane transport proteins, prediction of on- and off-kinetics, as well as semantic data integration.
Sylvie Garneau-Tsodikova, Associate editor
University of Kentucky, USA
Sylvie Garneau-Tsodikova obtained her PhD in Chemistry in 2003 from the University of Alberta (Professor John C Vederas). She then pursued her postdoctoral studies with Professor Christopher T Walsh at Harvard Medical School. In 2006, Sylvie joined the University of Michigan as the John G Searle Assistant Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the College of Pharmacy and the Life Sciences Institute.
In 2013, Garneau-Tsodikova relocated to the University of Kentucky as an Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the College of Pharmacy. She is the recipient of numerous research and teaching awards including the Vahlteich Research Award and NSF CAREER Award as well as the UK Blouin Award. She has published >85 manuscripts and has given >60 invited talks and plenary lectures on her work in Israel, India, Jamaica, Scotland, England, Canada, China, and USA.
Sally-Ann Poulsen, Associate editor
Griffith University, Queensland, Australia
ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4494-3687
Sally-Ann Poulsen is Professor and Deputy Director (acting) at Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery (GRIDD), Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. She holds a PhD in medicinal chemistry also from Griffith University, receiving a University Medal for academic excellence. Immediately following her PhD she was recipient of a Royal Society & National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Howard Florey Research Fellowship to undertake research at the University of Cambridge. On returning to Australia, she was awarded an Australian Research Council QEII Fellowship, followed by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship.
Poulsen works with collaborators in Australia and internationally, both from academia and industry on projects related to development of new chemical probes, medicinal chemistry targeting cancer and infectious disease, and fragment screening using native state mass spectrometry. Her research is defined by the application of chemistry expertise to address complex questions across biology.
Poulsen was appointed as a Fellow, Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI) in 2017. She is Chair elect of the RACI Medicinal Chemistry and Chemical Biology Division and is a global council member of the International Chemical Biology Society. She is author of >100 publications in the field of medicinal chemistry and chemical biology.
Yonghui Zhang, Associate Editor
Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Yonghui Zhang received his Ph.D in Chemistry in 2002 from Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences and pursued his postdoctoral training at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the United States. Dr. Zhang is now a Professor at the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences of Tsinghua University, a leader of higher education and academic research in China. Dr. Zhang has published over 60 papers in the field of medicinal chemistry, organic chemistry, chemical biology and immunology.
He has pioneered in discovering and characterizing the relationship between lipid metabolism and immune regulation. By using a multidisciplinary approach involving structural biology, molecular immunology, cell and mice models, and medicinal chemistry, he demonstrated that the mevalonate pathway is a druggable target for vaccine adjuvants and developed lipophilic bisphosphonates and statins as Th-1 vaccine adjuvants. Currently, his lab is developing and applying innovative chemical approaches to a variety of immuno-modulatory process, with a focus on vaccination, allogeneic immune cell therapy and new anti-infection strategy.
In addition to his academic work, through Unicet, a biotech start-up he co-founded, he is also moving forward in the newly emerging space of gamma delta T cell based therapeutics to translate his research work into innovative medicine and building proprietary biotech platforms centered around gamma delta T cells as the cell therapeutic vehicle and butyrophilin-targeting therapeutics.
Christopher Burns
Certa Therapeutics, Melbourne, Australia
ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4463-4916
Dr Burns has worked for over 25 years in drug discovery and development in both commercial and academic settings. He has extensive experience in early stage and translational drug discovery, is an inventor on over 30 patents and co-author of over 60 scientific papers. Dr Burns was the lead inventor of the drug momelotinib currently undergoing Phase III trials. Throughout his career he has worked in a range of disease areas including oncology, inflammatory disease and auto-immunity.
Dr Burns obtained his PhD in Organic Chemistry from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and undertook postdoctoral studies at Pennsylvania State University, USA. He subsequently worked at Pfizer UK prior to becoming Research Director at Melbourne-based biotech company Cytopia. Dr Burns has held academic positions at the University of Sydney and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research in Melbourne and more recently was CEO and Research Director at biotech start-up Metabloq Pharmaceuticals. Dr Burns is currently employed in senior roles at two biotech start-ups Certa Therapeutics and MecRx Pty Ltd, and is also a founder and board member of drug development company Amplia Therapeutics.
Paola Castaldi
LifeMine Therapeutics, USA
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1959-0007
Paola Castaldi is an experienced and passionate chemical biologist with experience in leading multidisciplinary teams supporting programs across several therapeutic areas and stages. Her drive towards embedding state-of-the-art technologies to drug discovery and development, resulted in several contributions to target identification, mechanism of action and safety deconvolution of therapeutics.
Before joining LifeMine Therapeutics, Paola headed the Chemical Biology & Proteomics department at AstraZeneca. Over the years Paola was responsible for the build of a state-of-the-art chemical biology and mass spectrometry hub with global impact across all therapeutic areas and platforms. Notably she played a critical role to the establishment of the protein degradation and the multiomics initiatives.
Before AstraZeneca, Paola was a key contributor of the Chemical Genetics group at Sanofi Oncology, Cambridge, MA with a focus on phenotypic drug discovery projects for the Wnt and KRAS oncogenic pathways.
Between other responsibilities, Paola is part of the SAB for the Chemical Biology Doctorate Program at Imperial College London and has authored more than 25 peer-reviewed articles.
Paola completed her undergraduate studies in pharmaceutical chemistry and received her Laurea (MSc) at University of Padova, Italy. She then went on to conduct graduate research studies at Imperial College London, UK and postdoctoral studies at UCSD and Boston University.
Matthew Fuchter
Imperial College London, UK
ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1767-7072
Matthew Fuchter is a Reader in Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London. In addition, he is working group lead within the new therapeutics Theme of the Imperial College Cancer Research UK Centre. He is a research board member of the Institute of Chemical Biology, co-director of the Imperial MRes in Drug Discovery, a panel member of the Cancer Research UK Multidisciplinary Award, and an appointed member of the Royal Society of Chemistry Organic Division. He is heavily involved in medicinal chemistry, chemical biology and translational activities at Imperial and externally.
His primary research interests concern the misregulation of epigenetic events in disease, although he has made a number of contributions to other disease areas/targets.
Jayanta Haldar
Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru, India
Jayanta Haldar completed his undergraduate training at the Presidency College, University of Calcutta and he received his Master of Science and PhD from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 2005. He then pursued his Postdoctoral Research at the Department of Chemistry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA till 2009. He then joined New Chemistry Unit at JNCASR as Assistant Professor (Faculty Fellow) in 2009 and currently he is an Associate Professor. He is also associated with the School of Advanced Materials (SAMat) at JNCASR.
Jayanta has received several awards and honours such as the Ramanujan Fellowship Govt. of India, CDRI Excellence in Drug Research Award in Chemistry, Chemical Research Society of India (CRSI) Bronze Medal, Sheik Saqr Career Award Fellowship, etc.
Over the past decade, his lab has been persistently undertaking a diverse set of projects in the field of Medicinal Chemistry and Chemical Biology, with the aim of tackling and preventing antimicrobial resistance and infections. His group has established various chemical strategies and invented several antimicrobial solutions through rationally designed semi-synthetic antibiotics and new synthetic drug-candidates with novel mechanisms of action. Haldar group has adopted innovative approaches to target drug-resistant bacteria through development of new class of glycopeptide-antibiotics and metallo-β-lactamase inhibitors.
Recently, his group has also developed antimicrobial peptide (AMP) mimics which can cure complex biofilm-related infections and engineered small-molecular antibiotic adjuvants which can, in combination, resensitize multiple classes of obsolete antibiotics ubiquitously, for tackling the most critical drug-resistant Gram-negative superbugs. As a part of the preventive strategy, Dr. Haldar’s group has engineered antimicrobial paints that prevent catheters/implant-associated infection and surgical-sealants that prevent/cure eye infections and promote wound-healing. The group has also developed antimicrobial coatings on Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) which can prevent the spread of bacterial, fungal and respiratory viral infections.
Yoshinori Ikeura
CEO/CSO Axcelead Drug Discovery Partners, Inc., Japan
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1593-3391
Yoshinori Ikeura obtained a PhD from Kyoto University by studying of Tachykinin NK receptor antagonists in 1999 and worked on natural products synthesis at MIT as a postdoctoral fellow until 2000.
He joined the Medicinal Chemistry Laboratories of Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Ltd in 1986. In 2011, he became the head of Inflammation Drug Discovery Unit at Pharmaceutical Research Division. Ikeura assumed the head of General Manager Office in 2012 and since 2014 he also held the post of the Site Head at Shonan Research Center in Japan.
He is currently CEO of Axcelead Drug Discovery Partners, Inc. since July 2017. Axcelead is Japan’s first provider of integrated drug discovery services- a one stop-shop for research providing.
Lyn Jones
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, USA
Lyn Jones completed PhD studies in synthetic organic chemistry at the University of Nottingham, before starting his post-doctorate research at The Scripps Research Institute, California in the area of chemical biology. In 2001, he joined Pfizer (Sandwich, UK) as a medicinal chemistry team leader. In 2011, he transferred to Cambridge, MA to become Head of Rare Disease Chemistry and to lead the Chemical Biology Group, before joining Jnana Therapeutics in 2017 as Vice President of Chemical Biology. He is currently Chief Scientist at the Center for Protein Degradation at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
In 2009, he won the inaugural Royal Society of Chemistry Young Industrialist of the Year Award for his contributions to HIV and COPD research and clinical candidate delivery.
He is an author or inventor on over 100 publications and patents, a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) and the Royal Society of Biology (FRSB), and he is an elected member of the Chemistry Biology Interface Division Council of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Jean-Louis Reymond
University of Bern, Switzerland
ORCID:https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2724-2942
Jean-Louis Reymond is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Bern, Switzerland. He studied Chemistry and Biochemistry at the ETH Zürich and obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Lausanne on natural products synthesis (1989). After a Post-Doc and Assistant Professorship at the Scripps Research Institute, he joined the University of Bern (1997). His research focuses on the enumeration and visualization of chemical space for small molecule drug discovery, the synthesis of new molecules from GDB (http://gdb.unibe.ch), and the design and synthesis of peptide dendrimers and polycyclic peptides as antimicrobials and for nucleic acids delivery. He is the author of > 300 scientific publications and reviews.
