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Chris Ho, M.D., Ph.D. - Owner & Chief Scientific Officer
Chris Ho received his M.D., Ph.D. from Washington University. With the collaborative input from over two dozen pharmaceutical companies and academic labs, he developed multiple software packages (including RACHEL & CHARLIE - licensed by over 40 pharmaceutical companies through Tripos, Inc.) to assist chemists in the combinatorial optimization of known leads. Currently he is developing automated solutions to accurately predict drug-receptor binding affinities using alchemical or linear interaction energy methods. Another area of focus is in computational biology where he is developing gene pathway mapping and 3D visualization methods for large scale -omics data in collaboration with Washington University.
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Jay Ponder, Ph.D. - Scientific Advisor
Jay Ponder received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Harvard, and postdoctoral training in Biophysics at Yale. He is currently Professor of Chemistry, of Biomedical Engineering, and of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics at Washington University, and is past Chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Computational Chemistry. Ponder is the founding developer of the AMOEBA polarizable multipole force field and the TINKER molecular modeling software package. He has served on the SAB of numerous companies, including CambridgeSoft, Protein Mechanics (Mountain View,CA), Algodign (Moscow, Russia), Pharmix, and Numerate (both in Brisbane, CA). His current research interests are in modeling and prediction of the thermodynamics of biomolecular processes, particularly ligand/drug binding energetics.
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Garland R. Marshall is Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics and of Biomedical Engineering and Adjunct Professor of Chemistry at Washington University. A pioneer in the field of computational chemistry, he founded Tripos Associates (NASDAQ:TRPS) and was its President and Chairman until 1987. He also founded MetaPhore Pharmaceuticals Inc. in 1995. From the ACS, he has received the 1988 Award in Medicinal Chemistry and the inaugural ACS Medicinal Chemistry Hall of Fame. From the APS, he has received the 1994 Vincent du Vigneaud Award and the prestigious 2001 Merrifield Award. He has served on the SAB of the Institute for Molecular Biosciences, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, the SAB of the Drug Discovery Institute of the University of Minnesota as well as a Trustee for the Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Sciences (La Jolla, CA). His interest in computer-aided drug design continues with improvements in force fields to generate correct estimates of binding affinities. His therapeutic research now focuses on control of epigenetic modulation targeting HIV expression in the search for a cure for AIDS, and in the development of novel anti-parasitics for malaria and schistosomiasis.
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