Enhancing the Efficiency of Medicinal Chemistry

Donald Kyle, Ph.D.

Biography:

Dr. Kyle is the Executive Director of Discovery Research at Purdue Pharma L.P., a group that he formed in 1998. His group is focused on pain research and builds their processes on the natural synergies between chemistry, pharmacology, informatics, and laboratory automation as a means of improving the quality of development candidates and the efficiency of finding them.

He is recognized internationally for his contributions in a number of areas including kinin receptor antagonists, computational methods development, and pain research. He has been an invited speaker at many international scientific conferences, and his scientific innovations are reflected in more than 80 technical papers and 24 issued United States patents. He is an editorial advisory board member for several scientific journals and teaches advanced courses in medicinal chemistry and computational chemistry at several universities.

Dr. Kyle obtained a doctorate degree in organic chemistry from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Texas Tech University in 1985. His dissertation research was directed toward new synthetic methodologies and the total syntheses of two sesquiterpene natural products. Upon joining Nova Pharmaceutical Corporation in Baltimore, Maryland, he worked as a medicinal chemist on programs related to pain, inflammation, and CNS disorders. During this time he also worked extensively on the design of chemical informatics systems and computational chemistry methods development and application. In 1991, he became the Director of medicinal chemistry, a position he maintained through a merger with Scios, Inc. until 1998 when he joined Purdue Pharma.

Abstract:

A major goal in medicinal chemistry is the “front-loading” of various risk evaluations into the design process as a way to enhance over-all efficiency. Risks include intellectual property, synthesis failure, poor PK, and developability. We have created a variety of computational tools that enable the chemists to assess many of these risks in real time as new compounds are designed and contemplated. We will describe our tools and our process for achieving high efficiency finding quality, low risk development candidate.