News & Events
ANSARIS ANNOUNCES NEW SCIENTIFIC ADVISORS
BLUE BELL, PA – January 25, 2011 – Ansaris is pleased to announce today that Stephen W. Fesik, PhD, and Michael K. Gilson, MD, PhD, have joined the company as scientific advisors. Drs. Gilson and Fesik will provide critical scientific input on Ansaris’ drug discovery programs.
Dr. Fesik is a Professor of Biochemistry, Pharmacology, and Chemistry and the Orrin H. Ingram, II Chair in Cancer Research at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. His lab focuses on cancer drug discovery using fragment-based approaches and structure-based design. Prior to joining the Vanderbilt faculty in May 2009, Dr. Fesik was the Divisional Vice President of Cancer Research at Abbott Laboratories where he helped build a pipeline of promising anticancer compounds. While at Abbott, he also developed several new NMR methods, determined the three-dimensional structures of many proteins and protein/ligand complexes, and developed and applied fragment-based methods in drug discovery. He is on the editorial boards of many journals and has won several awards including the lifetime achievement award in nuclear magnetic resonance by the Eastern Analytical Society, the SBS Technology Innovation Award, and the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award. Dr. Fesik obtained his PhD in Medicinal Chemistry from the University of Connecticut and was a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University.
Dr. Gilson is a Professor at the University of California San Diego Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. He was recently named to the chair in Computer-Aided Drug Design at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Director of the new UCSD Drug Discovery Institute, which aims to catalyze further developments in drug discovery across the entire UCSD campus. Dr. Gilson’s research interests include molecular recognition, physical chemistry and statistical mechanics of biomolecules, modeling and design of host-guest systems, and chemical and biological databases and informatics. From 1994 through 2009, Dr. Gilson was on the faculty of the Center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology, Rockville, MD, first as a NIST research chemist and then as a professor at the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute. He received his bachelor’s degree in Bioengineering from Harvard College and his PhD and MD degrees from Columbia University. He completed clinical training in internal medicine at Stanford University and Baylor College of Medicine, and was a postdoctoral fellow with J. A. McCammon at University of Houston.
“We are delighted that Drs. Fesik and Gilson will be joining as scientific advisors,” said Charles Reynolds, PhD, Head of Discovery Technologies at Ansaris. Dr. Reynolds continued, “As the pioneering architect of SAR by NMR, Dr. Fesik is perhaps the foremost authority in fragment-based drug design, and Ansaris will benefit greatly from his wealth of knowledge. Dr. Gilson is a world-renowned expert in molecular modeling and simulation. His seminal work on molecular recognition has greatly enhanced our fundamental understanding of the underlying physics of protein-ligand interactions, and we are thrilled to have him as part of our team.”
Joan Lau, PhD, CEO of Ansaris added, “We are extremely fortunate to have attracted such prominent scientists to help guide our programs. Both have made significant contributions in their respective areas of expertise and I am convinced that their combined insights and experience will help advance our drug discovery programs to the clinic.”
About Ansaris
Ansaris, a division of Locus Pharmaceuticals, is a privately-held biopharmaceutical company focused on solving today’s small molecule drug discovery challenges. Ansaris’ proprietary technology platform combines a torsion-space algorithm for building better protein modeling with in silico fragment-based drug design to yield break-through therapeutics. The approach has enabled the advancement of numerous “stalled” programs by identifying new
protein forms and novel binding sites including competitive and allosteric sites on enzymes and hotspots for protein-protein interactions. Ansaris has successfully generated drug candidates in oncology, inflammation, infectious and cardiovascular diseases and currently has ongoing collaborations with Ono Pharmaceuticals and Novartis.