Scaffold Hopping in Medicinal Chemistry

Nathan Brown is the Head of the In Silico Medicinal Chemistry group in the Cancer Therapeutics Unit at The Institute of Cancer Research in London (UK). At the ICR, Dr. Brown and his group support the entire drug discovery portfolio together with developing new computational methodologies to enhance the drug design work. Nathan Brown conducted his doctoral research in Sheffield with Professor Peter Willett focusing on evolutionary algorithms and graph theory. After a two-year Marie Curie Fellowship in Amsterdam in collaboration with Professor Johann Gasteiger in Erlangen, he joined the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research in Basel for a three-year Presidential Fellowship in Basel working with Professors Peter Willett and Karl-Heinz Altmann. His work has led to the pioneering work on multiobjective de novo design in addition to a variety of discoveries and method development in scaffold hopping, bioisosteric identifi cation and replacement, molecular descriptors and statistical modeling. Nathan continues to pursue his research in all aspects of in silico medicinal chemistry.