Speaker

Dr. Maurizio Pellecchia

Biography :

Maurizio Pellecchia, Ph.D. Professor of Biomedical Sciences, Endowed Chair in Cancer Research, School of Medicine, University of California Riverside, serves as the President and Founder for Armida Labs, Inc. Dr. Pellecchia is a chemical biologist with a strong background in pharmaceutical chemistry, biophysics and translational medicine. He pioneered several biophysics driven drug discovery approaches (fragment-based design, NMR guided combinatorial library screening, Lys/Tyr covalent agents) to tackle difficult drug targets including those involved in protein-protein interactions. To date he has authored nearly 200 peer reviewed publications and he is inventor on several issued or pending patent applications. He trained at the University of Naples (Italy) where he obtained a MS in Organic Chemistry and a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences, at the ETH-Zurich (working with 2002 Chemistry Nobel Laureate Prof. Dr. Kurt Wüthrich) and the University of Michigan. Prior to his recruitment at UCR, he was a Professor at the Sanford-Burnham-Prebys Medical Research Institute (La Jolla, CA) for nearly 15 years where he also served as Associate Director for Translational Research for the Institute’s NCI designated Cancer Center. Since 2016 he is also the Founding Director for the Center for Molecular and Translational Medicine at UCR. In addition to teaching specific pharmacology and drug discovery courses, he trains laboratory members in the development of innovative pharmacological agents and their use for target validation and drug development studies.