Research Highlights advisory panel

Papers and web sites in the Research Highlights section of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery are chosen with the aid of the following advisors:

David R. Blaustein

David R. Blaustein, M.D., is Co-Portfolio Manager of the healthcare fund at The Galleon Group. Previously, he was a partner and portfolio manager at Oracle Partners, a senior analyst at Zweig-DiMenna and a biotechnology analyst at Goldman Sachs. Before coming to Wall Street, David was an assistant professor of medicine and surgery at Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut. David holds an M.B.A. from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and an M.D. from the Weill Medical College, Cornell University, New York.

Erik De Clercq

Erik De Clercq holds the Professor P. De Somer Chair of Microbiology at the School of Medicine, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He obtained his M.D. in 1966 from Leuven University Medical School, and after research fellowships at Stanford, he returned to Leuven University to obtain his Ph.D. He is now Chairman of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Leuven University, and Chairman of the Directory Board of the Rega Institute. His research covers many aspects of antiviral chemotherapy, and he founded the International Society for Antiviral Research in 1988.

Roderick Flower

Professor Rod Flower, Ph.D., D.Sc., F.Med.Sci., is a Principal Fellow of the Wellcome Trust and Head of the William Harvey Research Institute, University of London, as well as President of the British Pharmacological Society. He was trained at the universities of Sheffield and London, and, before returning to academia, worked in the pharmaceutical industry for 12 years. He was previously Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Bath. Professor Flower's main interests are inflammation and the pharmacology of anti-inflammatory drugs, especially non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, glucocorticoids and adrenocorticotropic hormone. He also has an interest in platelet and cardiovascular pharmacology and in the history of the discipline of pharmacology itself.

F. Peter Guengerich

F. Peter Guengerich obtained his B.S. at the University of Illinois in 1970, and received his Ph.D. from the Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, in 1973. He did his postdoctoral training at the University of Michigan and then joined the Department of Biochemistry at Vanderbilt University in 1975. He has been Professor of Biochemistry since 1983 and has also served as Director of the Center in Molecular Toxicology since 1981. His interests include the enzymes involved in the bioactivation and detoxication of drugs, carcinogens and toxicants, particularly cytochrome P450. Current projects include the examination of mechanisms of polymerase fidelity and stalling at carcinogen adducts and thiol-dependent activation of haloalkanes.

Franz F. Hefti

Franz F. Hefti studied biology and pharmacology at the University of Zurich. He then completed postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, and the Max Planck Institute, Munich, and subsequently pursued an academic career in the United States, focusing on research in age-related neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. He conducted pioneering work in the area of neurotrophic factors by showing that these proteins can rescue dying nerve cells in the adult brain. These studies led to a broad research effort and continuing clinical trials with neurotrophic factors and related molecules. Since 1995, he has dedicated his activities to the discovery of novel drugs for neurological and psychiatric diseases in the pharmaceutical industry. From 1995-2001, he was Director of the Neuroscience Research Centre of Merck Sharp & Dohme, in Harlow, Essex, and has recently moved to San Diego to build up the new Neuroscience Drug Discovery Institute of the same company, Merck & Co., in the United States.

Joan Heller Brown

Joan Heller Brown obtained her Ph.D. in the Department of Pharmacology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, where she showed that antipsychotic drugs acted by inhibiting dopamine-receptor function. She went on to study catecholamine metabolism on a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Colorado, and subsequently joined the research faculty in Pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego. She was appointed to Assistant Professor in 1980, and rose through the ranks to her current position as Professor and Vice Chair. Her research concerns G-protein-coupled receptors linked to Gq, G12 and Rho, and focuses on their role in cell growth and apoptosis. She has served on Advisory Boards of several Pharmaceutical companies and on numerous editorial boards. Dr Heller Brown is currently Editor of Molecular Pharmacology.

Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen

Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen joined Novo Nordisk A/S in 1991 after three years at Leo Pharmaceutical Products, and in 1994, he became head of Diabetes Research and Development. He was appointed Corpo-rate Vice President of Drug Discovery in 1995 and Executive Vice President and Chief Science Officer in 2000. Professor Thomsen holds a D.V.M., Ph.D. and D.Sc. degree and in 2000, he became a professor of pharmacology at The Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on the mediators of inflammation and the discovery and characterization of novel anti-inflammatory and anti-diabetic drug candidates. He is also a member of the Board of Directors, Danish Technical Univer-sity

Hugo Kubinyi

Hugo Kubinyi studied chemistry in Vienna, Austria. After completing his Ph.D. thesis at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich he did his postdoctoral training at the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg. In 1966 he joined Knoll, later a subsidiary of BASF, and in 1985 he moved to BASF. Since 1987, until his retirement in summer 2001, he was responsible for the Molecular Modelling, X-ray Crystallography and Drug Design Group at BASF, and from early 1998 he also took charge of Combinatorial Chemistry in the Life Sciences. He is Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Heidelberg, former Chair of The QSAR and Modelling Society, and an IUPAC Fellow. Five books on QSAR, 3D QSAR and drug design and about 85 publications have resulted from his scientific work. He is co-editor of the Wiley-VCH book series Methods and Principles in Medicinal Chemistry, and member of the scientific advisory boards of several scientific journals.

Julio Licinio

Julio Licinio is Professor of Psychiatry, Medicine and Pharmacology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He directs the UCLA interdepartmental Clinical Pharmacology Center and the Graduate Training Program in Translational Investigation, and is also Associate Program Director of the UCLA General Clinical Research Center. He is Co-Director of the Laboratory of Pharmacogenomics. Julio Licinio graduated from medical school at the University of Bahia in Brazil and completed residencies and fellowships in medicine (University of S�o Paulo, Brazil), endocrinology (University of Chicago), psychiatry (The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center), and neuroendocrinology (National Institute of Mental Health). He is editor of The Pharmacogenomics Journal and Molecular Psychiatry. His research has been focused on psychoneuroendocrine-immune interactions. A new direction of his work is clinical pharmacogenomics.

Christopher A. Lipinski

Christopher A. Lipinski is a senior research fellow at the Groton, Connecticut, laboratories of Pfizer Global Research and Development. He obtained a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and did his postdoctoral training at Caltech, supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. After joining Pfizer in 1970, Chris supervised medicinal chemistry laboratories, discovering multiple gastrointestinal and diabetic clinical candidates. In 1990, he established a laboratory combining computations and experimental physical-property measurements. He is the author of "The Rule of Five", a widely used filter for drug-like properties. He is a member of the American Chemical Society and the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists, an adjunct faculty member at Connecticut College, New London, Connecticut, and most recently joined the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development.

Leslie Meyer-Leon

Leslie Meyer-Leon is a practising patent law attorney who specializes in biotechnology-related patent portfolio strategies, and is the founder of IP Legal Strategies Group, PC, which is located in Cape Cod, MA. She has a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has previously practised with a major intellectual property firm in the Boston area, as well as with one of Boston's largest general-practice law firms.

Tomi K. Sawyer

Tomi K. Sawyer completed his Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Arizona. He is now Chief Scientific Officer and Senior Vice-President of Drug Discovery and Innovative Technologies at Aileron Therapeutics where he oversees R&D campaigns focused on peptide therapeutics based on novel stapling chemistry and drug design strategies with an emphasis on signal transduction pathways for cancer and other diseases. His research background includes peptide and peptidomimetic receptor agonists, peptidomimetic inhibitors of proteases, and both peptidomimetic and non-peptide inhibitors of signal-transduction therapeutic targets, and he has over 250 publications and patents. With more than 25 years of industrial experience, including previous scientific and management positions at Pfizer Global R&D (including both Upjohn and Parke-Davis prior to their acquisitions by Pfizer), he is also an adjunct professor of chemistry as well as biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Massachusetts, and is an adjunct professor of cancer biology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

George W. Schlich

George W. Schlich is a European Patent Attorney who specializes in the fields of biochemistry, pharmacology, biotechnology and chemistry, with particular recent specialization in the genetic modification of plants and animals, embryology, antibodies, bacterial toxins, recombinant DNA and vaccines. He has a degree in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University, United Kingdom, and is a partner in the London firm of Mathys & Squire. In 1998, George was elected to the Council of the Chartered Institute of Patent Agents and is now Chair of the Institute's Education Committee.

Janet Woodcock

Dr Janet Woodcock is an internist/rheumatologist with a research background in immunology. She received her medical degree from Northwestern Medical School, Chicago, Illinois, and completed further training and held faculty appointments at the Pennsylvania State University and the University of California at San Francisco. Dr Woodcock joined the FDA in 1986. She was Director of the Division of Biological Investigational New Drugs in the Center for Biologic Evaluation and Research (CBER) from 1988 to 1992, and was Acting Deputy Director of the Center in 1991 and 1992. Subsequently, she was Director of the Office of Therapeutics Research and Review, CBER, before joining the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research as Director in May 1994.

Top

Main navigation

Extra navigation

Open Innovation Challenges

naturejobs

More science jobs
Post a job for free

Advertisement