Stephen W. Fesik to Receive SBS 2010 Technology Innovation Award
The Society for Biomolecular Sciences has selected Dr. Stephen W. Fesik as the winner of the SBS 2010 Technology Innovation Award.
The Society for Biomolecular Sciences has selected Dr. Stephen W. Fesik as the winner of the SBS 2010 Technology Innovation Award. Fesik will accept his award during the SBS 16th Annual Conference & Exhibition in Phoenix, Arizona, April 11-15, 2010.
This award is given for an outstanding novel technology that is predicted to have a significant impact on the field of biomolecular sciences. The novel technology is likely to be unproven in the field but has the potential to have a huge impact on our processes and technology toolboxes.
Currently, Fesik is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, where he leads a group focused on cancer drug discovery. He is also a member of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, the Institute of Chemical Biology, and the Center for Structural Biology.
“I feel honored to be nominated for the SBS 2010 Technology Innovation Award. I appreciate this recognition of my work on fragment-based approaches to lead discovery,” said Fesik. “With the introduction of fragment-based methods, we now have an approach for targeting proteins previously thought to be undruggable. Indeed, I am using fragment-based methods and structure-based design to discover inhibitors of very difficult targets that are highly validated with the goal of developing effective cancer therapies.”
Prior to Vanderbilt, Fesik was Divisional Vice President of Cancer Research at Abbott Laboratories where he led a group responsible for discovering new drugs to treat cancer. He also developed several new NMR methods and determined the three dimensional structures of several proteins and protein/ligand complexes. In addition to these structural studies, he developed a method for drug discovery called SAR by NMR and applied this method to identify and optimize ligands for binding to many protein drug targets. His research has also involved the use of siRNA for target identification and target validation.
Fesik earned his Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry from the University of Connecticut and was a post doctoral associate at Yale University in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. He has published more than 230 papers, trained 27 postdoctoral fellows, has been a reviewer for the NIH Biophysical Chemistry Study Section, and has served as a member of the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, Journal of Biomolecular NMR, Biophysical Journal, Molecular Cell, Chemical Biology & Drug Design, ChemMed-Chem, Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, Oncogene, and the Highlights Advisory Panel for Nature Reviews Cancer.
Source: Society for Biomolecular Sciences