Company's Development of Drugs to Treat Tropical Diseases Will Benefit From Expertise of Dr. Alexander Tropsha
Upstream Biosciences Inc. (OTCBB: UPBS) today
announced the appointment of Alexander Tropsha, Ph.D. of the University of
North Carolina (UNC), one of the world's leading chemoinformatics experts,
to the company's Scientific Advisory Board. Chemoinformatics combines
chemistry and computer science to accelerate the speed and reduce the cost
of discovering drugs to treat disease.
Joel L. Bellenson, Chief Executive Officer of Upstream, said Dr. Tropsha
brings invaluable knowledge and validation to the company's drug discovery
and drug development programs.
"Dr. Tropsha is widely considered to be the leading authority in the world
at applying chemoinformatics to infectious disease, including malaria,"
said Bellenson. "We are fortunate that he has chosen Upstream as his first
advisory board position with a company that is developing treatments for
infectious disease."
Dr. Tropsha said he anticipates working closely with Upstream to help the
company succeed at its primary objective of developing novel compounds to
treat the parasitic diseases that afflict millions of people living and
travelling in the tropics.
"I have reviewed and am impressed with Upstream's advanced computational
drug discovery platform. The company has demonstrated the capability to
identify and optimize multiple drug candidates quickly and efficiently,"
said Dr. Tropsha. "Upstream's library of compounds has produced a number of
candidates with the potential to treat major tropical diseases."
Dr. Tropsha is Professor of Medicinal Chemistry and Chair of the Division
of Medicine Chemistry and Natural Products of UNC's Eshelman School of
Pharmacy. Dr. Tropsha is also Director of the Laboratory for Molecular
Modeling at the School of Pharmacy and Director of the UNC Graduate Program
in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.
The research in Dr. Tropsha's laboratory is supported by several grants
from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, the
Environmental Protection Agency, and pharmaceutical companies. He has
authored or co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and book
chapters.
His current research interests include computer-aided drug design
(ligand-based and structure-based design methods), chemoinformatics
(quantitative structure activity relationships, combinatorial library
design, and database mining), structural bioinformatics (protein structure
analysis and prediction, identification of structural and functional
protein motifs), and molecular simulations of proteins and peptides.
Dr. Tropsha is a member of several editorial boards, including the Journal
of Chemical Information and Modeling.
