MCDDCONGRESS2025 | Medicinal Chemistry Conference | Drug Discovery | Drug Delivery Conference | Nice | France | Meeting | Summit | Symposium

Prof. Magid Abou-Gharbia

Temple University, USA

Title: Phenotypic and Target-Based Drug Discovery Approaches for The Discovery of Innovative Therapeutics

Magid Abou-Gharbia is a Laura H. Carnell Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Temple University’s School of Pharmacy and adjunct Professor at the College of Sciences and Technology (CST) at Temple University. Magid joined Temple University in 2008 following his 26-year tenure as a medicinal chemistry researcher and leader in the pharmaceutical industry, where he rose through the ranks to ultimately become Senior Vice President for Chemical and Screening Sciences at Wyeth Research (now part of Pfizer). Magid led teams of researchers that delivered numerous new chemical entities into clinical evaluation and 10 Marketed innovative drugs benefiting millions of patients worldwide, these included blockbuster and First in Class drugs such the antidepressants Serotonin and Norepinephrine Reuptake inhibitors Effexor® and Pristiq®, the First FDA approved antibody-drug conjugate anticancer Mylotarg®, and Tygacil®, an innovative antibiotic for treating resistant bacterial infections.

In 2008 Magid transitioned to academia joining School of Pharmacy at Temple University where he founded the Moulder Center for Drug Discovery Research, a medicinal chemistry-centric academic drug discovery organization whose mission is focused on the discovery of novel drugs for unmet medical needs, provide guidance to academic researchers and training new generations of drug discovery scientists. Under his leadership, the Moulder Center identified novel drug candidates for the treatments for cocaine and alcohol addiction, metabolic disorders, cancer, and lysosomal storage diseases, which led to the formation of 4 spin off companies based on licensing of his Center’s IP to external companies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yotuH6ZU0c

Dr. Abou-Gharbia has held a number of leadership positions since joining Temple. He served as School of Pharmacy’s Associate Dean for Research (2008-2019) and as the Director of the Moulder Center for Drug Discovery Research (2008-2020). In recognition of his contributions and successes he was named Laura H. Carnell Professor in 2013 and receiving Temple University Outstanding Service Award in 2022.

Magid’s research has resulted in over 133 publications in peer reviewed journals. He has co-authored 5 book chapters and delivered over 235 presentations as an invited lecturer at scientific conferences and academic institutions worldwide. He holds over 125 issued US patents and over 350 issued world patents. Magid has received numerous awards in recognition for his research contributions including two ACS Heroes of Chemistry awards for discovery of Effexor® and Torisel®, Induction into New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame and the ACS Medicinal Chemistry Hall of Fame, Proctor Medal, Chemical Pioneer Award, Pennsylvania Bio Award and Educator of the Year Award, Grand Hamdan Award for Excellence in Biomedical Sciences and Drug Discovery. He is a Fellow of both the American Chemical Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry and hold adjunct professorship position at various academic institutions in the US and abroad and is on the board of several scientific and Professional organizations.

Prof. Olga Krizanova

Slovak Academy of Sciences, Slovak Republic

Title: Will update soon

Will update soon

Prof. Brian Blagg

University of Notre Dame, USA

Title: Will update soon

Brian Blagg is the Charles Huisking Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Director of the Warren Family Research Center for Drug Discovery and Development at Notre Dame. After earning B.A.’s in Chemistry and Environmental Studies at Sonoma State University, and his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Utah (Dale Poulter), he received an NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship and performed research at The Scripps Research Institute with Dale Boger. Blagg started his independent career in medicinal chemistry at the University of Kansas in 2002. In the fall of 2017, he moved to the University of Notre Dame wherein his lab continues to focus on chaperone proteins and protein folding in relation to cancer and neurodegeneration. Cancers are inherently more dependent on chaperone proteins because of their constant division and cellular stress. Consequently, Blagg’s team works to selectively inhibit chaperone proteins to halt cancer growth. In contrast, his lab also studies the potential for utilizing chaperones to re-fold malfunctioning and/or aggregated proteins for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and glaucoma. Brian Blagg is married to Leah Blagg and has three children, ranging in ages between 11 and 24. When not thinking about science, Blagg can be found with his family and friends.

Prof. Thomas Webster

Hebei University of Technology, China

Title: Eliminating Infection in Over 30,000 Human Patients: The Impact of Nanomedicine

Thomas J. Webster’s (H index: 129) degrees are in chemical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh (B.S., 1995; USA) and in biomedical engineering from RPI (Ph.D., 2000; USA). He has formed over a dozen companies who have numerous FDA approved medical products currently improving human health in over 30,000 patients. His technology is also being used in commercial products to improve sustainability and renewable energy. He is currently helping those companies and serves as a professor at Brown University, Saveetha University, Hebei University of Technology, UFPI, and others. Dr. Webster has numerous awards including: 2020, World Top 2% Scientist by Citations (PLOS); 2020, SCOPUS Highly Cited Research (Top 1% Materials Science and Mixed Fields); 2021, Clarivate Top 0.1% Most Influential Researchers (Pharmacology and Toxicology); 2022, Best Materials Science Scientist by Citations (Research.com); and is a fellow of over 8 societies. Prof. Webster is a former President of the U.S. Society for Biomaterials and has over 1,350 publications to his credit with over 66,000 citations. He was recently nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Prof. Webster also recently formed a fund to support Nigerian student research opportunities in the U.S.

Prof. Zhang Ao

Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China

Title: Drug discovery targeting the glycolytic checkpoint phosphoglycerate kinase

Ao Zhang received his PhD diploma in Chemistry in 2000 at Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He then joined Professor Alan P. Kozikowski's Drug Discovery Group at Georgetown University Medical Center as a Postdoctoral Fellow. In 2002, he joined Professor John L. Neumeyer's Medicinal Chemistry Program as a Research Investigator at McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He was promoted to Instructor at Harvard Medical School and Assistant Director of the Medicinal Chemistry Program at McLean Hospital in 2004. He was awarded Alfred Pope Young Investigator Award in 2004 and Adam Corneel Young Investigator Award in 2005 from Harvard Medical School. In 2006 he received the Hundred Talent Project award from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and became the Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica (SIMM). In 2011, he was awarded the Distinguished Young Investigator Award from Chinese Natural Science Foundation. Since 2020, he joined Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and as Dean of College of Pharmaceutical Sciences. His research interests include the design and synthesis of novel small molecules as structural and functional probes for the diagnosis and treatment of brain disorders and cancer by using the state-of-art medicinal chemistry strategy. He has authored or co-authored over 190 publications and 80 patents. Three anti-tumor drug candidates from his research group are now under phase I-II clinical trials and many more are in preclinical studies.

Prof. Hassan Karimi-Maleh

University of Electronic Science and Technology, China

Title: Aptamer based electrochemical biosensors as powerful biomarker tools

Hassan Karimi-Maleh works as professor in The Quzhou Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, Quzhou People's Hospital, China. He worked at School of Resource and Environment, University of Electronics Science and Technology of China (UESTC) from 2019 – 2024 as full Professor. He is a highly cited researcher selected by clarivate analytics 2018 (cross-filed), 2019 (Agriculture field) and 2020 (cross-filed), 2021 (Chemistry and Agriculture, two categories in one year) and 2022 (Chemistry and Agriculture, two categories in one year) and Top 1% Scientists in Chemistry and Agriculture simultaneously in ISI Essential Science Indicators from 2014 until now. He has published more than 500 SCI research papers with more than 27000 citations and H-index 94 (according to WOS report) and 32000 citations and h-index 103 (according to google scholar). He works as editorial board of more than 20 international journals such as Alexandria Engineering Journal (co-editor in editor ELSEVIER IF 6.626). He also works as adjunct Professor in University of Johannesburg, South Africa, Saveetha School of Engineering, Chennai, India and Lebanese American University, Lebanese. He worked as leader nanobiosensor group in Ton Duc Thang University, Vietnam 2019-2020 Recently, he published one paper in Science journal. His main research interest includes development of chemically modified sensor and biosensors using DNA, Aptamer and enzyme as biological recognition element for food, biological, pharmaceutical and environmental compounds analysis and investigation of electrochemistry behavior of electroactive materials such as polymers, organic and inorganic compounds.

Prof. Torchilin Vladimir

Northeastern University, USA

Title: Will be announced soon

Vladimir Torchilin got his M.S, Ph.D., and D.Sc. degrees from the Moscow State University and currently serves as a University Distinguished Professor and Director, Center for Pharmaceutical Biotechnology and Nanomedicine, Northeastern University, Boston. He has published more than 450 original papers, more than 200 reviews and book chapters, wrote and edited 15 books, and holds more than 40 patents. Google Scholar shows more than 90,000 citations of his papers with H-index of 132. He is Editor-in-Chief of Current Drug Discovery Technologies, Co-Editor of Current Pharmaceutical Biotechnology and on the Editorial Boards of many other journals. He received more than $20 M from the governmental and industrial sources in research funding. In 2005-2006 he served as a President of he Controlled Release Society. He is the member of the European Academy of Sciences and has multiple national and international honors and awards including the Blaise Pascal medal in Biomedicine from the European Academy of Sciences. In 2011, Times Higher Education ranked him number 2 among top world scientists in pharmacology for the period of 2000-2010. In 2021 Elsevier/Stanford analysis ranked him as a single highest-cited researcher among more than 130,000 ranked researches in the area of Pharmacology/Pharmacy. He is also 2023 Clarivat Citation Laureate. In 2024, he has been named an inaugural Highly Ranked Scholar by ScholarGPS.

Prof. Ya-Qiu Long

Soochow University, China

Title: Bright Bioorthogonal Platforms for Precision Cancer Theranostics

Dr. Long joined Suzhou Medical College of Soochow University in Suzhou, China as the distinguished professor and vice dean. She has published more than more than 100 scientific publications and is a named inventor of 25 issued Chinese patents and 2 U.S patents. Research Interests: (1) Medicinal chemical biology, and (2) Small molecule and peptidomimetic modulators targeting the non-enzymatic sites, and (3) Spatiotemporal control modification of biomolecules for theranostic modality development.

Prof. Howard R. Morris

Imperial College, London, UK

Title: 30 Years of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Discovery and Characterisation with Q-TOF Mass Spectrometry

Professor Howard R. Morris FRS is the Emeritus Professor of Biological Chemistry at Imperial College, London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society. He has over 400 peer reviewed publications and a citation index >40,000. He is the recipient of academic awards from several institutions including the Gold Medal Awardee of the University of Naples (1989), the European Blaise Pascale Medal for Life Sciences (2010), the Institute of Physics Franklin Medal and Prize (2012), the Royal Society Royal Medal and Prize (Queen’s Medal) for Interdisciplinary Sciences (2014), together with several Honorary Doctor of Science awards including the highest award of the Imperial College Council: Degree of Doctor of Science DSc honoris causa “In recognition of outstanding contributions made in the field of Biotechnology” (2021). Professor Morris is also the Chairman and Chief Scientific Officer of the BioPharmaSpec Group, a Contract Research Organisation supporting the Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Industries in accelerating product development worldwide.

Plenary Speakers