Scientific Advisory Board
Christopher Lipinski, PhD
Retired, Pfizer
Dr. Christopher Lipinski was Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the Pfizer Global R&D Groton CT Laboratories following his retirement in June 2002 and is now a Scientific Advisor to Melior Discovery, a drug repurposing startup. He is a member of the American Chemical Society (ACS), AAPS, Society of Biomolecular Sciences (SBS) and EUFEPS. A consultant on drug-like properties he serves on numerous scientific advisory and journal editorial boards. He is the author of the "rule of five" a widely used filter to select for acceptable drug oral absorption. In 2006, he received an honorary law degree from the University of Dundee and is the 2006 Society for Biomolecular Sciences Achievement Award winner. In 2005, he was the American Chemical Society winner of the E. B. Hershberg Award for Important Discoveries in Medicinally Active Substances and in 2004 the winner of the Division of Medicinal Chemistry Award of the ACS Division of Medicinal Chemistry. Since 1984, he has been an adjunct faculty member at Connecticut College in New London CT, and has over 225 publications and invited presentations and 17 issued US patents.
James McKerrow, MD, PhD
Principal Investigator, Sandler Center, UCSF
Dr. James McKerrow holds the Robert E. Smith Endowed Chair in Experimental Pathology, at UCSF, is Director of the Tropical Disease Research Unit, and Director of the Sandler Center of Basic Research in Parasitic Diseases. His research interests are in the biochemistry and molecular biology of parasitic diseases. We work on tropical parasites like Schistosoma mansoni (bilharzia, blood fluke), Entamoeba histolytica (amebiasis), Onchocerca volvulus (the agent of African River Blindness), and Trypanosoma cruzi (Chagas' disease). Our major research themes are molecular mechanisms of host invasion and virulence, gene regulation during parasite development, and structural analysis of parasite enzymes. Dr. McKerrow earned a PhD in Biology from UC San Diego, and his MD at University of New York, Stony Brook. He did his medical residency and postdoctoral work at UCSF.
Adam Renslo, PhD
Associate Director, Small Molecule Discovery Center, UCSF
Adam Renslo was born in 1971 in Tripoli, Libya and raised in Wisconsin. He received a B.A. degree in Chemistry from Saint Olaf College in 1993 and went on to receive a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1998) for work on new cycloaddition methods with Rick Danheiser. After post-doctoral work at the Scripps Research Institute, he accepted a position at Vicuron Pharmaceuticals (then Versicor, Inc.) where he was involved in antibacterial and antifungal drug discovery projects, most recently as Associate Director of Medicinal Chemistry. While at Vicuron, he led a medicinal chemistry team that identified second-generation oxazolidinone antibacterial drug candidates that have progressed into human clinical trials. In 2006 he moved to the University of California, San Francisco where he is currently Associate Director of the Small Molecule Discovery Center and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry. His research team is currently engaged in anti-trypanosomal drug discovery and the design and implementation of novel prodrug strategies.
David Roos, PhD
Merriam Professor of Biology, University of Pennsylvania
Wes Van Voorhis, MD, PhD
Professor of Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Pathobiology and Microbiology,
Director of Training Program, Infectious Diseases,
and Director of Tropical Medicine and Infectious Diseases Clinic, University of Washington
Wes was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona and attended MIT as an undergraduate. He attended Cornell Medical College and Rockefeller University for his MD/PhD where he was the first to discover and characterize human dendritic cells (antigen presenting accessory cells). His advisor, Dr. Ralph Steinman was recently awarded the Lasker Award for Dr. Steinman's discovery of dendritic cells. Wes spent time in Brazil during his graduate work working on leprosy and thereafter resolved to work on problems of global health importance. He trained in Internal Medicine at UC San Francisco. Wes is a Professor of Medicine and an Adjunct Professor of Pathobiology and Microbiology at the University of Washington. Wes practices medicine, teaches, does research on malaria, trypanosomes, leishmania, and syphilis, and administers the Infectious Diseases Fellowship Training Program. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers and won numerous academic awards.
James H. Wikel
Retired, Eli Lilly
Jim served in a variety of positions from the time he joined Eli Lilly in 1971 to 2001 as a scientist and research manager including Head, Structural and Computational Sciences, Discovery Chemistry Research & Technologies as well as Senior Research Scientist. He has 34 peer-reviewed scientific publications and 47 issued U.S. Patents. The subject matter included in these patents and publications describe 3 molecules that underwent clinical evaluation as drug candidates—enviroxime,enviradene, and frentizole—and one successfully marketed agricultural product, BEAM. As a computational chemistry scientist, he has published in a broad range of topics with expertise in QSAR studies and algorithm development. He established the QSAR group at The Lilly Research Labs and initiated the development of proprietary predictive methods. Jim was Chief Technology Officer of Coalesix Inc., a start up company in Cambridge, MA, from 2005 until it became a division of Icosystem Inc. in December 2006. His experiences enable him to understand and translate among the disciplines of chemistry, biology and statistics to enable medicinal chemists to optimize molecules for development using both predictive models and empirical approaches. He has Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry and Master of Science degree in Organic Chemistry, both from Marshall University.