Stephen K. Burley, M.D., D.Phil., F.R.S.C., CSO and Sr. VP, SGX Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Stephen Burley is the chief scientific officer of SGX Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (SGX; http://www.sgxpharma.com/), located in San Diego , California . SGX is an oncology focused drug discovery and development company, with multiple protein kinase inhibitors in preclinical development, including compounds targeting imatinib resistant BCR-ABL, c-MET, and JAK2. Prior to joining SGX, Burley was the Richard M. and Isabel P. Furlaud professor and chief academic officer at The Rockefeller University, and a full investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He has authored or coauthored more than 170 scholarly scientific articles. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the New York Academy of Sciences. Burley received an M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School in the joint Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program and, as a Rhodes Scholar, received a D.Phil. in Molecular Biophysics from Oxford University . He trained in internal medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, and did post-doctoral work with William N. Lipscomb at Harvard University and Gregory A. Petsko at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With William J. Rutter and others at the University of California , San Francisco and The Rockefeller University, Burley co-founded Prospect Genomics, Inc., which was subsequently acquired by SGX.

Chao Lin, Ph.D. Vertex Pharmaceuticals

Dr. Chao Lin received his M.Sc. degree in Biochemistry from Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry in China in 1988, and his Ph.D. degree in Molecular Microbiology from Washington University at St. Louis in 1995. At Washington University , Dr. Lin worked in Dr. Charles M. Rice's laboratory and was one of the pioneer scientists whose molecular virology research led to identification and characterization of hepatitis C virus (HCV) encoded proteins between 1992 and 1994. After a short post-doctoral period in the Dr. Rice's group, Dr. Lin jointed Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. and has played a leading role in the structure-based drug discovery of antiviral against multiple HCV targets over the past decade. As head of HCV Virology group at Vertex, Dr. Lin is responsible for discovery of multiple clinical candidates as anti-HCV agents, including VX-950 or telaprevir, a HCV NS3-4A protease inhibitor that is currently in phase 2b trials for hepatitis C. More recently, Dr. Lin directed the preclinical studies on VX-950/telaprevir and in vitro characterization of variants observed in clinical trials of VX-950/telaprevir. Dr. Lin has over 30 peer-reviewed publications on HCV and more than a dozen patents or patent applications.

J. Andrew McCammon, Ph.D. Professor, UCSD

J. ANDREW McCAMMON is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and of the NSF Center for Theoretical Biological Physics at UCSD. He holds the Joseph E. Mayer Chair of Theoretical Chemistry at UCSD, and is Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology at the UCSD School of Medicine. He was born in Lafayette , Indiana in 1947. He received his B.A. from Pomona College , and his Ph.D. in chemical physics from Harvard University , where he worked with John Deutch on biological applications of statistical mechanics and hydrodynamics. In 1976-78, he was a research fellow at Harvard, where he developed the computer simulation approach to protein dynamics in collaboration with Martin Karplus. He joined the faculty of the University of Houston as Assistant Professor of Chemistry in 1978, and was promoted to Full Professor and appointed to the M.D. Anderson Chair in 1981. He moved to his faculty positions at UCSD in 1925. Professor McCammon has developed novel theoretical methods for accurately predicting and interpreting molecular recognition, the rates of diffusion-controlled reactions, and other properties of chemical systems. In addition to their fundamental interest, these methods play a growing role in the design of new drugs, enzymes, receptors, and other materials. Professor McCammon is the author with Stephen Harvey of ¡°Dynamics of Proteins and Nucleic Acids¡± (Cambridge University Press), and is the author or co-author of more than 500 publications on a variety of subjects in theoretical chemistry and theoretical biochemistry. About 50 of his former students now have tenured or tenure-track positions at leading universities or research institutes. Within the US, these include the Universities of California (4), Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri (2), North Carolina, Texas, and Utah; Lawrence Livermore and Pacific Northwest National Laboratories (5), New York University, Washington University at St. Louis (2), and Vanderbilt. Elsewhere, these include University College Dublin, the EMBL/EML in Heidelberg , the ETH Z¨¹rich, the IITs of Bombay and Madras , International University of Bremen, University of Manchester , National Taiwan University , Philipps-Universit?t Marburg, Saarland University, the University of Toronto , and the Universities of Pisa and Verona . As a consultant to industry, Professor McCammon guided the establishment of the computer-aided drug discovery program of Agouron Pharmaceuticals (now Pfizer Global Research and Development, La Jolla Laboratories), and contributed to the development of the widely prescribed HIV-1 protease inhibitor, Viracept. He has also been a consultant to Sterling-Winthrop Pharmaceuticals, Stardent Computers, Rhone-Poulenc, Accelrys, Kimberly-Clark, DuPont-Merck Pharmaceuticals, Merck & Co., and Bristol-Myers Squibb. The McCammon group's studies of HIV-1 integrase flexibility contributed to the development of a new class of potential antiviral drugs by Merck & Co.; these compounds entered clinical trials in 2005. Professor McCammon has served on advisory boards for the National Academy of Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and other agencies. He received the first George Herbert Hitchings Award for Innovative Methods in Drug Design from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund in 1987. In 1921, he was the Centennial Lecturer at the University of Chicago . In 1925, he received the Smithsonian Institution's Information Technology Leadership Award for Breakthrough Computational Science, sponsored by Cray Research. In 2002, he received the UCSD Chancellor's Associates Award for Research. His other awards include an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, a Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health, and a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, and the Biophysical Society.

Jeffrey A. Stafford, Ph.D. Vice President of Chemistry, Takeda San Diego

Dr. Jeffrey A. Stafford is the Vice President of Chemistry at Takeda San Diego. Dr. Stafford's principal responsibilities include managing the research activities of both Chemistry and Computational Sciences. Using structure-based drug design and contemporary medicinal chemistry, his teams concentrate on producing lead drug candidates and performing all necessary studies to optimize the leads to the level of pre-clinical candidates or beyond.

Prior to joining Takeda San Diego, Dr. Stafford served as Director of Chemistry in Oncology at Glaxo SmithKline, Inc., Research Triangle Park , where he had strategic responsibility for the portfolio of Lead Optimization programs within oncology. During his tenure at Glaxo SmithKline (GSK), Dr. Stafford was involved in therapeutic programs in inflammation, virology, neuroscience, and oncology, and he led the research team in the discovery of GW786034 (pazopanib), now in phase III clinical development for the treatment of solid tumors. Dr. Stafford has co-authored over 40 peer-reviewed manuscripts and abstracts, has been an invited speaker at numerous domestic and international conferences, and serves as a reviewer on several international chemistry journals.

Dr. Stafford is a co-inventor on over 35 patents, issued or pending. He received his B.S. in Chemistry at the University of California , Los Angeles in 1984 and received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Cornell University in 1989. Dr. Stafford also served as an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley from 1989-1921 in the labs of Professor Clayton Heathcock.

Darryl Reid, MSc., is a computational scientist and marketing representative for SimBioSys Inc. He obtained his bachelors of science in Chemistry from Memorial University of Newfoundland ( Canada ). Upon completion, he enrolled in the new Computational Science's Masters program at Memorial where his focus was on computational chemistry and its applications. From 2001 to 2004, Darryl was a key member of the Technical Analyst Support Program of C3.ca ( Canada 's leading High Performance Computing organization), at Memorial's Advanced Computation and Visualization Centre. In that role, he gained valuable experience in many areas of computational science in the academic world. Darryl joined the SimBioSys team in 2004