Wednesday, October 12, 2011

 

 

 

Ronald White, PhD

Senior Vice President, XenoBiotic Laboratories and President

White Global Pharma Consultants, LLC

 

“New Ways to Apply Mass Spectrometry to

Drug Discovery and Development”

 

 

Social mixer, 5:30 pm in Frick Laboratory, Taylor Commons..

Presentation, 6:30 pm in the Auditorium followed by dinner in Taylor Commons.

 

 

Abstract

Discovery and development of new medicines primarily involves the biological and medical sciences, but in the beginning of the discovery process medicinal chemistry, in the form of synthesis and Structure-Activity Relationships, plays a central role. Of course, this is stating the obvious, since all new small-molecule drug candidates are chemical compounds. Not so obviously, chemistry continues to be important as we progress through discovery and clinical development, in the form of bioanalysis, impurity identification, and metabolite identification, all three of which are essentially chemical in nature. In contrast to the discovery lead optimization phase, in which NMR is the single most important instrumental technique for medicinal chemists, these later chemical activities are mostly accomplished by mass spectrometry. The power of recent advances in mass spectrometer instrumentation (e.g. high-resolution MS; comprehensive ion recording) and, equally importantly, software-based post-acquisition data mining (e.g. mass-defect filtering; accurate-mass baseline subtraction) is just starting to be appreciated. In this talk we will concentrate on the problem of rapid and reliable metabolite identification in both the discovery and clinical arenas and illustrate how cutting-edge MS technology facilitates this process. Medicinal chemists, analytical chemists and drug metabolism scientists have a learning curve and some traditional boundaries between disciplines to overcome before the full benefit of applying these new techniques to old problems can be realized.

 

Biography

Ronald E. White, Ph.D. is President of White Global Pharma Consultants, LLC, which is based in Cranbury, NJ and provides advice and problem-solving services for pharmaceutical R&D internationally. He received a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Wisconsin in 1974 and completed post-doctoral training in the biochemistry of the cytochrome P450 enzymes at the University of Michigan. Dr. White began his career as a faculty member of the University of Connecticut School of Medicine but made the switch to the pharmaceutical industry in 1987 as a Research Group Leader at Bristol-Myers Squibb in Princeton, NJ. Later he moved to the Schering-Plough Research Institute in Kenilworth NJ, where he became Vice-President of Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics. He is a past member of the Pharmacology Study Section of the National Institutes of Health and of the Drug Metabolism Technical Group of Pharmaceutical Research Manufacturers of America and was Chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Drug Metabolism. He is presently a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Drug Metabolism and Disposition and Adjunct Professor of Chemical Biology in the Rutgers University School of Pharmacy. Dr. White has lectured and published extensively in the areas of drug metabolizing enzymes, pharmacokinetics and drug discovery and is the holder of five United States patents.