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.

Dr. Meadows is a primary inventor of the SARbyNMR 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 nearly 20 years experience in the pharmaceutical industry.

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.

Barbara Chie-Leon has over 10 years experience in the field of protein expression, purification and biochemical assay development.  Barbara has been involved in several high-throughput crystallography programs such as the kinase pipeline program at SGX pharmaceuticals.  While at SGX, Barbara purified nearly 60 different proteins, many of which were kinases that could not be purified by traditional purification methods.  Barbara was also a member of the biochemistry group where she developed and conducted assays for lead optimization and fragment-screening by biochemical assay. Prior to joining Zenobia, Barbara was at ActiveSight. Here, she developed purification and baculovirus expression protocols for difficult proteins and successfully cloned, expressed and refolded of proteins isolated from E. coli.  Barbara is known for her unique perspective and intuition in developing protocols for expression and purification of proteins that ultimately produce protein crystals.

Vandana Sridhar has nearly 15 years experience in the field of protein crystallization.  Vandana has worked at several prestigious institutions including Scripps Research Institute, Merck and Co., and Syrrx.  While at Scripps, Vandana crystallized many difficult proteins including the first p450, 2C5 which is a membrane bound protein and oversaw the crystallization efforts of the Joint Center for Structural Genomics (JCSG).  While at Syrrx, Vandana worked on several key drug discovery targets and led the kinome crystallization effort.  Prior to joining Zenobia Therapeutics, Vandana was a purification and crystallization scientist at ActiveSight.  During her time at ActiveSight, Vandana was widely believed to possess the Midas touch as she was able to produce diffraction quality crystals from even the most challenging targets.

Cheyenne Logan was a significant team member of the Protein Structure Initiative (PSI) 1 and 2 purification group while at SGX Pharmaceuticals where she purified over 500 crystallization quality proteins which included NHRs, kinases, phosphatases, and proteases.  At SGX Pharmaceuticals, she also managed, purified and characterized several targets for the Eli Lilly collaboration which included phosphorylated, lysine methylated, refolded, and secreted proteins.  At the University of California, Irvine, she initiated the purification of CCR5, a transmembrane chemokine receptor utilized for HIV entry into cells.  She synthesized, purified, and characterized peptides which included Byetta and Symlin while at Amylin Pharmaceuticals.  Prior to joining Zenobia Therapeutics, while at ActiveSight, she cloned, expressed and purified client target protein which included kinases, tautomerases, proteases.

Leslie Hernandez is a graduate of San Diego Sate University with a Bachelors of Science degree in Biology and a Women’s Studies minor.  She graduated with cum laude honors and numerous recognitions, such as Mortar Board, Golden Key, Phi Beta Kappa, Alpha Epsilon Delta, and Phi Eta Sigma from the university and is highly qualified.  Leslie has conducted research on chromosome rearrangements and replichore balance to see how they contribute to fitness in salmonella enterica.  With her findings, she has presented her data to researchers in the microbiology field, which has aided to further studies. She also has crystallography experience working at ActiveSight, where she was trained by some of the leading scientists in San Diego.  Her precision and accuracy is what sets her apart from the competition.  Her ambitious drive will continue in her efforts to excel in future projects.