June 27, 2008
Upstream Biosciences Inc. has appointed Alexander Tropsha, PhD, of the University of North Carolina, chair of the School’s Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products, to the company’s Scientific Advisory Board.
Tropsha one of the world’s leading chemoinformatics experts. Chemoinformatics combines chemistry and computer science to accelerate the speed and reduce the cost of discovering drugs to treat disease.
Joel L. Bellenson, chief executive officer of Upstream, said Dr. Tropsha brings invaluable knowledge and validation to the company’s drug discovery and drug development programs.
“Dr. Tropsha is widely considered to be the leading authority in the world at applying chemoinformatics to infectious disease, including malaria,”Bellenson said. “We are fortunate that he has chosen Upstream as his first advisory board position with a company that is developing treatments for infectious disease.”
Tropsha said he anticipates working closely with Upstream to help the company succeed at its primary objective of developing novel compounds to treat the parasitic diseases that afflict millions of people living and travelling in the tropics.
“I have reviewed and am impressed with Upstream’s advanced computational drug discovery platform. The company has demonstrated the capability to identify and optimize multiple drug candidates quickly and efficiently,” Tropsha said. “Upstream’s library of compounds has produced a number of candidates with the potential to treat major tropical diseases.”
Tropsha is also director of the School’s Laboratory for Molecular Modeling and director of the UNC Graduate Program in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.
The research in Tropsha’s laboratory is supported by several grants from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, and pharmaceutical companies. He has authored or coauthored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters.
His current research interests include computer-aided drug design (ligand-based and structure-based design methods), chemoinformatics (quantitative structure activity relationships, combinatorial library design, and database mining), structural bioinformatics (protein structure analysis and prediction, identification of structural and functional protein motifs), and molecular simulations of proteins and peptides.
Tropsha is a member of several editorial boards, including the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. He is a permanent member of the National Institutes of Health Biodata Management and Analysis Study Section.
He is an elected member of the board and vice-chair of the International QSAR and Modeling Society. QSAR (quantitative structure-activity relationships) is used to predict chemical properties directly from chemical structure. When combined with other alternative test methods, QSAR can minimize the need for animal tests while making the use of chemicals safer.
Tropsha received his MS in chemical enzymology in 1982 and his PhD in biochemistry and pharmacology in 1986, both from Moscow State University. He emigrated to the United States in 1989, two years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In 1991, after two years of postdoctoral research at UNC, he joined the School of Pharmacy as an assistant professor and director of the Laboratory for Molecular Modeling.
About Upstream Biosciences Inc.
Founded in 2004, Upstream Biosciences is focused on developing and commercializing drug candidates to treat tropical diseases, including malaria, trypanosomiasis and leishmaniasis. Caused by parasites that have developed resistance to available treatments, these diseases afflict millions of people living in the tropics with death, illness, malnourishment and economic hardship. Upstream’s drug candidates are generated using its proprietary computer-assisted drug discovery progress. The company’s lead drug candidates have demonstrated antiparasitic efficacy in vitro and positive safety data in animals. Animal efficacy studies are anticipated to begin during the third quarter of 2008.
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