William Janzen is a professor of the practice in the Division of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry and director of assay development and compound profiling in the Center for Integrative Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery, both of which are part of the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He joined the School in August 2008.

Jantzen received his educational training in physics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He managed a comparative endocrinology lab at UNC until 1989 when he joined Sphinx Pharmaceuticals, then a start-up biotechnology company. Following Eli Lilly and Company’s acquisition of Sphinx in 1994, Janzen became director of lead generation technologies and operations for Eli Lilly and Company’s Sphinx Laboratories site in the Research Triangle Park, NC. In 2001 Janzen left Eli Lilly to help found Amphora Discovery as vice president of operations. He was promoted to the position of president and member of the board of directors in 2007.

Janzen was also instrumental in founding the Society for Biomolecular Screening, a nonprofit scientific society dedicated to the advancement of the art and science of screening.He is a past executive council member of the SBS and served as president of the SBS in 1999 and 2000. Janzen championed the use of industrial processes and quality control in drug discovery. Internal processes at Sphinx and Lilly were first and best in class and demonstrated the success of industrialization in a research environment. Janzen then highlighted them via key presentations and publications to facilitate acceptance across the industry. He assembled a leading publication on high throughput screening, “High Throughput Screening, Methods and Protocols”, Humana Press.

Research Interests

• Drug Discovery
• High Throughput Screening
• Automation and Process Improvement