News & Announcements

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2008 News

ICB&DD Congratulates Elizabeth Boon, the recipient of NYSTAR James D. Watson Young Investigator Award. NYSTAR awarded her $200,000 for her proposal entitled: “H-NOX domains for sensing and delivery of biologically important gas molecules” http://www.nystar.state.ny.us/pr/08/press02-08.htm She has also recently won the ACS PROGRESS/Dreyfus "rising star" Award. Congratulations Professor Elizabeth Boon.

ICB&DD is pleased to announce that the January 2008 issue of Accounts of Chemical Research (ACS) features Professor Ojima as the Guest Editor with a newly designed format including Conspectus, on "Modern Molecular Approaches to Drug Design and Discovery" (http://pubs3.acs.org/acs/journals/toc.page?incoden=achre4). This special thematic issue consists of 15 articles including contributions from Professors Ojima and Tonge as well as Professor Glenn Prestwich (former Chemistry Professor, SBU). Also, an article by Professor Ghosh (Purdue Univ.) was coauthored by a recent SBU Chemistry Ph.D. alumnus, Dr. Bruno Chapsal (Ph.D. 2005, Ojima). Congratulations Professor Ojima.

Centers of Excellence in Chemical Methodologies and Library Development (CMLD) at Stony Brook NIH-NIGMS P50 proposal was submitted.

ICB&DD, (Iwao Ojima, Kaneko Takushi, Kathy Parker, Rob Rizzo, Dale Drueckhammer, Carlos Zimmerling, Jin Wang and Lee Arnold), Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (Derek Tan) and Brookhaven National Laboratory (Subramanyan Swaminathan) have joined together to establish a Center of Chemical Methodologies and Library Development at Stony Brook by recently submitting a proposal for the RFA-GM-08-007, Centers of Excellence in Chemical Methodologies and Library Development (P50). The Chemical Methodologies and Library Development Center at Stony Brook University (CMLD-SBU) will establish a core facility for the synthesis of high-quality chemical libraries, which will be used ultimately in high-throughput biological screening. The library synthesis core facility will validate newly developed methodologies from three project teams for synthesis of chemical diversity libraries and apply newly developed chemical methodologies to the generation of the high purity libraries. The core will store the final libraries and provide samples to the NIH Molecular Small Molecule Repository (10-20 mg per compound). The core will also provide them through members of the biological research community for biological screening. We look forward to the success of the important CMLD application.

2007 News

ICB&DD is pleased to announce that 4 recipients of Fusion-Seed Grant Awards ( 9 total awards in 2007) from Stony
Brook School of Medicine are members of ICB&DD. The Fusion awards are listed as follows:

• Richard A. Clark, MD (PI) Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Adam J. Singer, MD (Co-PI)
  Professor, Department of Emergency Medicine, "Fibronectin peptides for wound healing in diabetes".
  
• James Konopka, PhD (PI) Professor, Department of Molecular Genetics & Microbiology, Roger Johnson, PhD
  (Co-PI) Professor, Department of Physiology & Biophysics, "Novel anti-fungal drug strategy".
  
• Iwao Ojima, PhD (PI) Professor, Department of Chemistry, ICB & DD, Stanley Zucker, MD (Co-PI), Professor,
  Department of Medicine, VAMC/Northport, Maria Ryan, PhD (Co-PI), Professor, Department of Oral Biology
  & Pathology "Preclinical studies on DHA-SBT-1214 for IND filing".
  
• Peter Tonge, PhD (PI) Professor, Department of Chemistry, Thomas O'Riordan (Co-PI) Associate Professor,
  Department of Medicine "Aerosol delivery of TB drugs".

ICB&DD Inaugural Annual Symposium

On October 12, 2007, the ICB&DD hosted its inaugural ICB&DD Annual Symposium, entitled “Frontiers in Chemical
Biology and Drug Discovery”, which was held at the Charles B. Wang Center at Stony Brook University. The event was extremely well attended by faculty, staff and students on campus as well as researchers from Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). Dr. Ojima, Distinguished Professor and Director of ICB&DD introduced the first speaker, Dr. B. Horwits, Distinguished Professor, Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, who presented her lecture on “Taxol, Tubulin and Tumors: Challenges in the New Era of Cancer Therapeutics”. This informative and inspiring talk recounted Dr. Horwits’ pivotal and pioneering research on taxols that in the 1980’s, led to the development of paclitaxel, one of the most important anticancer agents ever developed. Peter Tonge, Professor of Chemistry, introduced the second speaker, Professor, Vern Schramm, Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Schramm’s presentation, “Drug Design from Enzymatic Transition States”, was a stimulating lecture on his detailed methodology of elucidating exact transition-state structures of enzyme-catalyzed reactions, which led to the development of powerful and selective inhibitors as potential drugs.

Todd Miller, Professor of Physiology and Biophysics, introduced the third speaker, Professor Philip Cole, Johns Hopkins University, who gave a comprehensive and enthusiastic lecture on “Chemical Approaches to sorting out Histone Modifications”. Dr. Cole outlined his research accomplishments on chemical and biochemical approaches in the study of signal transduction and gene regulation. Finally, Dr. Maria Ryan, Professor of Oral Biology and Pathology, was proud to introduce Dr. Barry Coller, Vice-President for Medical Affairs and Physician-in-Chief, The Rockefeller University. Dr. Coller, who was a familiar face to Stony Brook as he had previously been a faculty member at Stony Brook University School of Medicine, was delighted to give a lecture to all his former colleagues and students on“Application of High Throughput Screening and Molecular Docking to Identify Novel Inhibitors of Integrin allbβ3”. Dr. Coller’s current research focuses on multiple areas of platelet physiology. Dr. Coller was the inventor of the very first drug FDA approved developed at Stony Brook University, Reopro (angina medication), and his lecture was a splendid culmination of the ICB&DD symposium.

Dr. Richard Fine, Dean of the School of Medicine, was on hand to congratulate the students and faculty for the outstanding work presented in the poster sessions. From the 43 posters, two were selected for the first and second place prizes. The award-winning posters described research from the laboratories of Drs. Peter Tonge (Chemistry) and Isaac Carrico Chemistry).

The evening concluded with a wonderful banquet at the Zodiac Gallery in the Wang Center. Among other invitees
were Drs. Gail Habicht (Vice President for Research ), Richard Fine (Dean, School of Medicine), Carl Anderson (Chair,
Biology BNL) and Ben Hsaio (Chair, Chemistry Department), who all congratulated the successful establishment of
ICB&DD and praised Professor Ojima for his leadership and vision, which brought together truly interdisciplinary and
productive collaborations between East, West and South campuses as well as BNL.

The symposium was cosponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Research, School of Medicine Office of Scientific Affairs, Department of Chemistry, Schering-Plough Pharmaceutical Research Institute, OSI Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and Forest Laboratories, Inc.

2007 Annual ICB&DD Symposium Program

The ICB&DD is pleased to announce the inaugural "2007 Annual ICB&DD Symposium" on "Frontiers in Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery" which will be held at the Charles B Wang Center on Friday, October 12, 2007. The inaugural Symposium invites prominent scholars in chemical biology and drug discovery to highlight cutting-edge research accomplishments and exchange of creative ideas for biomedical research among speakers, faculty, staff, and students on campus as well as researchers at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and industries in greater NY metropolitan area. The plenary speakers are Dr. Susan B. Horwitz (Albert Einstein College of Medicine), Dr. Philip A. Cole (Johns Hopkins University), Dr. William F. DeGrado (University of Pennsylvania), Dr. Vern L. Schramm (Albert Einstein College of Medicine) and Dr. Barry S. Coller (Rockefeller University). There will be a poster session on recently completed and on-going projects conducted by the ICB&DD member's laboratories as well. We are looking forward to this high profile symposium!
Registration Form

• ICB&DD would like to welcome Dr.Lee Arnold, as a new Project Member. Dr. Arnold is the President of DiscoverElucidations, LLC and a Visiting Professor at the Department of Chemistry, Stony Brook University. He has served as a Vice President for OSI Pharmaceuticals (where he was the inventor of the OSI's number 1 anticancer drug, "Tarceva") and the Project Team Leader for successful cancer drug discovery programs at BASF and Abott. His expertise in cancer chemistry and discovery as well as drug development would clearly be very beneficial to ICB&DD.
• ICB&DD would like to welcome Dr. Takushi Kaneko, as a Project Member. Dr. Kaneko is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Chemistry and a former Research Scientist at Pfizer (1989-2007) and Bristol-Myers Squibb (1977-1989). He is a highly established medicinal chemist with extensive experience in the area of drug discovery for infectious diseases as well as cancer. He is also an expert in natural products chemistry and synthetic organic chemistry. Dr. Kaneko will bring in his industrial perspective to the drug discovery development at ICB&DD
• ICB&DD is pleased to announce that Dr. Carlos Simmerling assumed his new role as the Director of the "ICB&DD Computational Biology Program" as of March 12, 2007. Because of the acquisitions of a super computer from IBM "Blue Gene" ($26M) as well as a couple of high power computer clusters on campus, the Computational Biology has become highly competitive.

  Since ICB&DD has very well networked computational biologists; (Drs. Carlos Simmerling, Robert Rizzo, Jin Wang, and David Green) with superb computational facilities, the ICB&DD Director and the Steering Committee believe it is the right time for them to have an independent program. The "ICB&DD Structural and Computational Program" continues as the integration of the two programs, i.e., "ICB&DD Structural Biology Program" (Dr. Daniel Raleigh, Director) and "ICB&DD Computational Biology Program" (Dr. Carlos Simmerling, Director).

• ICB&DD would like to welcome Dr. Richard Lin, as a Project Member. Dr. Lin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine (Hematology) and Institute of Molecular Cardiology, School of Dental Medicine. Dr. Lin is interested in the signaling pathways that control cell growth and survival, and how alterations in these pathways lead to cardiac hypertrophy and heart failure or cancer. He has an ongoing collaboration with Dr. Dale Drueckhammer (Chemistry) on the development of small molecule inhibition of the mTOR kinase domain for treatment of breast cancer and tuberous sclerosis complex.
  
  
  
  
• ICB&DD is pleased to announce that Professor Maria E. Ryan, Oral Biology and Pathology; Director of Clinical Research, School of Dental Medicine, has joined the ICB&DD as a Steering Committee Member. Dr. Ryan is interested in the development of new diagnostic and therapeutic modalities for the management of periodontal disease Special emphasis on oral-systemic disease links. She has been collaborating with Distinguished Professor Lorne Golub for the developments of tetracyclines. Her expertise in the preclinical and clinical studies of tetracyclines will provide significant input into the drug discovery and development efforts of ICB&DD.
• ICB&DD is pleased to announce the addition of Dr. Basil Rigas as a Member and Steering Committee Member to ICB&DD. Dr. Rigas is a Professor in the Department of Medicine (Preventive Medicine) as well as Pharmacological Sciences, and Director of Cancer Prevention Center as well as Chief, Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology . Dr. Rigas is leading a highly promising preclinical and clinical research on nitroaspirins as chemotherapeutic as well as chemopreventive drugs for cancer, especially colon and pancreatic cancers. His basic research interests include the biochemical effects and mechanism of nitric oxide release from nitroaspirins. ICB&DD welcomes Dr. Basil.
• ICB&DD is pleased to announce that Dr. Wadie Bahou, Professor, Department of Medicine (Hematology) and Vice-Dean for Scientific Affairs, SOM, has joined the Steering Committee. Dr. Bahou has been associated with ICB&DD as a Project Member since 2004. His new appointment as a Steering Committee member will further strengthen the bridge between ICB&DD and School of Medicine at Stony Brook.