David Moreland

CAREER SUMMARY

Dr. Moreland has over 21 years of research experience in a large pharmaceutical company. With broad expertise in molecular modeling, cheminformatics/QSAR, and structural bioinformatics, he has made key contributions to projects in several therapeutic areas, including CNS, cardiovascular, antiretroviral, and antibacterial. He has applied both ligand-based and structure-based techniques to help teams identify numerous early clinical candidates, including one phase II compound. He has worked on GPCR, nuclear hormone receptor, protease, and RNA targets.

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Therapeutic Area Support

  • Derived a unique receptor-atom-based pharmacophore model for muscarinic agonists that led to a novel core structure for CI-1017, which was developed through phase II clinical trials
  • Using pharmacophore modeling, identified the chemical series leading to clinical candidate CI-979
  • Applied de novo design techniques to nuclear hormone receptor agonists, leading to early clinical candidates
  • Demonstrated a correlation between in vitro and in vivo assay data that provided the basis for the mechanistic rationale in the Lyrica NDA.
  • Provided a sound structural/mechanistic rationale for the observed metabolic stability of a chemical series, enabling a CNS team to advance a compound to early clinical development.
  • Performed structural bioinformatics analyses of protein target structures and active site druggability that significantly improved the early strategy of novel enzyme targets
  • Applied series design techniques to the design of combinatorial arrays that resulted in novel active compounds.

Methodology

  • Established guidelines for CADD support of GPCR projects to appropriately allocate CADD resources with shared expectations with project teams
  • Devised and wrote scripts to implement a method in Sybyl/Unity to perform scaffold hopping in the context of binding-site structure
  • Led a CADD/NMR collaboration that designed an NMR screening library and developed strategies for following up fragment hits
  • Inventoried methods used by Ann Arbor CADD that provided a reference for CADD members and a context for objectively assessing needs and redundancies
  • Wrote software for identifying regions of preferred interactions around functional groups
  • Actively fostered collaborations between project teams and biochemistry, calorimetry, crystallography, mass spectroscopy, and NMR

Educational

  • Led a team to develop a set of demonstrations that illustrate the role of CADD to visiting students, community leaders, and teachers
  • Identified, evaluated, recommended, and wrote copy for examples included in the protein folding and 3D drug design modules in a Virtual Classroom project

EDUCATION

Ph.D., Organic Chemistry; The University of California, Berkeley, CA 1984
B.S., Chemistry; The University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 1975

MEMBERSHIPS / AFFILIATIONS

Alpha Chi Sigma
American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Chemical Society
Sigma Xi