IDDD Roundtable Workshop Computer-Aided Drug Discovery

Rajiah Denny, Sr. VP, HotSpot Therapeutics, Boston MA

Intrigued by the intersection of molecular modeling and cheminformatics, R. Aldrin Denny (“Denny”) has nearly two decades of experience in computational chemistry applied in the context of active drug discovery programs. Denny is a team-oriented leader and is excited to bring his creative approach for regulatory pocket identification to HotSpot’s platform and programs.

Prior to joining HotSpot, Denny held roles of increasing responsibility at Pfizer, most recently as Associate Research Fellow in Inflammation and Immunology Chemistry and Chair of the Computational Chemistry network group. He also headed up multiple external scientific innovation collaborations with various academic scientists.

Previously, he worked as a Senior Principal Scientist at Wyeth where he had responsibilities to hire and manage computational chemistry partner organizations including GVK Bio and Strand Life Biosciences involved in scientific application development. He also served on the systems integration team that consolidated the Pfizer-Wyeth research infrastructure, for which he received an Award of Excellence.

Denny received his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras and completed his post-doc at Harvard University. Denny is lead author on more than 48 publications and manuscripts.

Amit Gupta, Ph.D. is the Computational Chemist for the Texas Medical Center’s Accelerator for Cancer Therapeutics (TMC|ACT). Amit is passionate about drug discovery and science strategy in hopes of ultimately helping patients in need. Though he is trained as a computational chemist and has extensive experience in computational ligand and target-based drug design approaches, he is also well versed in experimental biophysical and biochemical assays. He has many years of successful track record of in big pharma and academic environments through learning and implementing computer-aided drug design (CADD) and medicinal chemistry intuition and taking the designs to the bench. Amit’s previously held roles include Scientist at AstraZeneca, and postdoctoral fellow at Ewha Woman’s University in South Korea, UT Health Science Center at Houston and University of Houston. Amit obtained his Ph.D. degree from one of India’s national laboratories, CSIR-central drug research institute (CDRI) and his research activities are well documented in more than 22 peer-reviewed publications and patents in the fields of medicinal chemistry and drug discovery.