Leadership
- Nienaber, et al., (2000) Nature Biotechnology, 18 1105
- Saunders, Nienaber, et al., (2004) J Med Chem 47, 1709
- Muchmore, ...Nienaber (2000) Structure 8, 243
- Hadjuk, Meadows, Fesik (1997) Science 278, 497
- Buchanan, Bounaud et al., Mol Cancer Ther (2009) 8, 3181
Vicki Nienaber, Ph.D.: President and CSO, Founder
Dr. Nienaber is well known for her pioneering work in the field of drug discovery using fragment-based screening and structure-based drug design. Vicki has managed both drug discovery and development programs giving her a unique perspective on the specifications of early lead compounds that will yield high-quality clinical candidates. Vicki was most recently the Chief Scientific Officer at ActiveSight, a division of Rigaku Americas Corporation, where she built a diverse team of protein biochemistry, X-ray crystallography and drug discovery experts. Before that, she was the Senior Director of Lead Discovery and Crystallography at SGX Pharmaceuticals, where she oversaw strategic drug discovery and structural biology alliances with Novartis and Eli Lilly and initiated their internal kinase lead discovery project. While at Abbott Laboratories, she was the lead inventor of crystallographic fragment-based screening, co-inventor of the ACTOR robotic system for automated crystal sample handling and a leader in structure-based drug design methods. Vicki has written numerous peer-reviewed scientific publications and patents and has been recognized with several awards including the Commitment to Excellence award while a post-doctoral fellow at DuPont-Merck and the Chairmans Award for significant contributions while at Abbott Laboratories. Her passion about curing diseases, abilities in producing drug-like lead compounds and belief in this amazing team of scientists led her to found Zenobia Therapeutics.
Robert Meadows, PhD.: Co-Founder
Dr. Meadows is a primary inventor of the SAR by NMR FBLD method first published in Science in 1996. The method was developed at Abbott laboratories and Dr. Meadows work contributed to two FBLD derived clinical candidates while at Abbott. He has extensive experience in cheminformatics, computational chemistry and NMR spectroscopy. Dr. Meadows built the first fragment library that is still in use at Abbott Laboratories. At Zenobia, Dr. Meadows built custom databases for storing scientific and business data. He has also served as an advisor in the design of Zenobia’s proprietary CNS library. Dr. Meadows has more than 20 years experience in the pharmaceutical industry.
Pierre-Yves Bounaud, Ph.D: Director of Medicinal Chemistry
Dr. Bounaud has over 10 years experience in target-directed drug discovery, in
particular fragment-based lead discovery and is inventor on 14 patents. He is
experienced in fragment-to-lead and lead optimization synthetic chemistry and
computational design. During his time at SGX Pharmaceuticals, Dr. Bounaud was
part of the original team that integrated SGX Pharmaceuticals’ high-throughput
crystallography platform with a traditional drug discovery engine, thus creating the
Fragment of Active Structures (FAST) platform for fragment-based drug design. In his seven years at SGX, Dr. Bounaud successfully applied FBLD and structure-based drug design to several projects as exemplified by the c-Met program. Specifically, Dr. Bounaud led the chemistry team from the bench to deliver the Phase I clinical candidate SGX523 and the back-up development candidate SGX126 which were both potent and highly selective small molecule c-Met inhibitors in a 16-month time period.
John Badger, PhD.: Director of Structural Biology
Dr Badger has over 20 years of experience in computational crystallography, structure-based drug discovery, fragment-based lead discovery and automated structure determination. John is a pioneer in high-throughput crystallography. At SGX Pharmaceuticals, John led the development and implementation of one of the first automated structure determination pipelines. This software was used to determine over 100 novel structures, over 1000 co-crystal structures and was subsequently adapted to analyze crystallographic fragment-based screening data. Immediately prior to joining Zenobia Therapeutics, John was Director of Structural Biology at ActiveSight. He co-developed MIFit+, Rigaku's automated structure solution software suite and ran the Automatic Structure Consortium, an organization whose members included representatives from several large pharmaceutical companies. At ActiveSight, John developed algorithms to analyze fragment-screening data, designed the ActiveSight fragment library and was instrumental in performing the fragment co-crystal structure analysis for ActiveSight’s pilot lead discovery program.
Linda Pullan, Ph.D. Business Development and Licensing
Dr. Pullan has over 20 years experience in pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Dr. Pullan has closed numerous deals with up-fronts ranging up to $100 M. Deals include both in and out licensing of therapeutics and technology. Dr. Pullan was a licensing manager at Astra Zeneca and spent over 5 years as Director of licensing at Amgen. She was most recently VP of Business Development at Kosan Biosciences. Dr. Pullan regularly represents Zenobia at bio-partnering meetings, assists in valuation and deal terms and oversees our licensing efforts.
