Pharmaceutical Chemistry

Biography

Frank M. Boeckler received his Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry from the University of Erlangen (Germany) in 2004 under supervision of Prof. Peter Gmeiner. He is specialized in computational chemistry and drug design, ranging from QM methods to in silico screening. In 2006, he joined Prof. Sir Alan R. Fersht at the MRC Center for Protein Engineering in Cambridge/UK as Marie Curie fellow and discovered there p53 mutant stabilizers as potential new cancer therapeutics. While working in Cambridge at the interface of experiment and theory, he focused on molecular biology and biophysics. In 2008, he was appointed as Professor (W2tt) for Bioanalytics at Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU) Munich. In 2010, he moved to Eberhard Karls University Tubingen as Professor for Medicinal Chemistry/Drug Design, where he now heads the Laboratory for Molecular Design & Pharmaceutical Biophysics. Since 2014, he is also member of the Center for Bioinformatics Tubingen. He received several awards, including the Klaus-Grohe Award in Medicinal Chemistry, the Research Award of the Dornhecker Foundation and the PHOENIX Pharmazie-Wissenschaftspreis. In 2014, he was announced to be runner-up for the EFMC Prize for a Young Medicinal Chemist in Academia. His work is dedicated to understanding molecular interactions, particularly -hole bonding effects, as the foundation for chemical biology and drug research and to apply theoretical, chemical, biological, structural and biophysical methods to cancer research, particularly, for targeting the human kinome and the extensive p53 network.

Research Interest

• Understanding molecular interactions particular focus is halogen bonding, an innovative, bifunctional interaction. In drug research by generating tools, models, strategies and concepts for molecular design and fragment-based screening. Diversity-optimized and target-focused halogen-enriched fragment libraries (HEFLibs), use medicinal chemistry in combination with structural biology and computational chemistry for lead optimization of HEFLibs. • Develop and optimize biophysical and computer-aided techniques for screening, innovative assay formats, based on semi-automated titration, magnetic beads, and solid-phase synthesis by plate-spotting. With DEKOIS2.0, we have established tools for benchmarking of virtual screening strategies. • Extending the idea of molecular design to structured therapeutic peptides, developing a chemical tool-kit that can be used for selecting antibody-like, structured peptides, such peptides will be useful for therapeutic, diagnostic, analytical procedures, because they can be easily functionalized or linked to proteins, ligands, materials, radioisotopes, etc. • He is particularly interested in innovative therapeutic concepts in oncology, including individualized therapy und novel targets: e.g. p53 mutant rescue and therapeutic intervention in the p53 pathway; studying the paradigm of molecular chaperones for protein-(mis)folding diseases, targeting protein-protein interactions, kinase polypharmacology, epigenetic targets, etc.