MedChemWatch has the honor to acknowledge the winners of the EFMC Awards. In this issue, we present a short biographical sketch of Camille Wermuth, University Louis Pasteur Strasbourg and Prestwick Chemicals, winner of the Nauta Award for Pharmacochemistry, Antony Wood, Pfizer Global Research and Development, Sandwich UK, winner of the UCB-Ehrlich Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry and Klaus Müller, Roche-ETH Zurich, winner of the Prous Institute- Overton and meyer Award for New Technologies in Drug Discovery.

Camille G. Wermuth was for more than three decades Professor of Organic and Medicinal Chemistry at the Faculty of Pharmacy at the Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg, France.

He became interested in Medicinal Chemistry during his two years of military service in the French Navy at the "Centre d'Etudes Appliquées à la Marine" in Toulon. During this time, he worked under the supervision of Dr. H. Laborit, the scientist who invented artificial hibernation and discovered chlorpromazine. Later he created and headed for 27 years the Molecular Pharmacochemistry Unit of the CNRS (“Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique”) in Strabourg. This unit was original in that it had three areas of responsibility: synthetic organic chemistry, medicinal chemistry and computer modeling.

His research has led to the development and synthesis of many research tools for the Neurosciences and to the development of a new psychotropic drug, minaprine, marketed in Europe since 1980. His interests focussed on GABAergic and cholinergic drugs, dopamine D3 receptor ligands, and CRF receptor antagonists. Professor Wermuth is the author and co-author of over 300 peer-reviewed scientific papers. He holds over 60 patents. He is the author, co-author, and editor of several books or book chapters. His most recent book, "The Practice of Medicinal Chemistry," first published in 1996, and now published in the third edition, was translated into several languages, including Japanese and Chinese.

Besides his academic carreer he was always interested in industrial collaborations and drug discovery projects. This resulted in the foundation of the medicinal chemistry company Prestwick Chemicals in 1999 in which he put all his efforts after retirement from University. He became President and Chief Scientific Officer of the company and was responsible for the success of the company. Over the years Prestwick was continuously growing and has now more than 30 employees.

Professor Wermuth has been awarded the Charles Mentzer Prize of the Société Française de Chimie Thérapeutique, the Léon Velluz Prize of the French Academy of Science, and the Prix de l'Ordre des Pharmaciens by the French Academy of Pharmacy. He is Corresponding Member of the German Pharmaceutical Society, and was nominated Commandeurs des Palmes Académiques. He has been nominated President of the Division of Chemistry and Human Health of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC).

On the occasion of the 21th International Smposium on Medicinal Chemistry 2010 in Brussels he will be awarded with the Nautea Award.

Tony Wood is Vice President and Head of Worldwide Pfizer Medicinal Chemistry, Pfizer.

Tony Wood has been named as the 2010 winner of the prestigious UCB-Ehrlich Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry.
The award is conferred by the European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC) every two years to acknowledge and recognize outstanding research in the field of medicinal chemistry in its broadest sense by a young scientist.

Tony Wood was selected as the 2010 recipient by an International Selection Committee, in part, due to his leading the discovery of maraviroc, Pfizer’s breakthrough therapy for HIV infection and the first small molecule antagonist of the CCR5 receptor. In addition to his role guiding Pfizer’s strategy for medicinal chemistry, Tony Wood is an active member of the scientific community and demonstrates a commitment to medicinal chemistry education through a number of external roles.

Tony Wood was appointed Head of Worldwide Medicinal Chemistry at Pfizer in 2008. Prior to this he was Head of Chemistry and Exploratory Medicinal Sciences in Sandwich from 2007, and Head of Chemistry from 2004. Tony Wood joined Pfizer (Sandwich) as a Scientist in Discovery Chemistry in 1992. Over the next eight years, he made a number of contributions to the delivery of development candidates in various projects from within the Sexual Health, Urology, and Gastrointestinal therapeutic areas.
Tony Wood was appointed to the role of Manager in 1999 with responsibility for Anti-Infectives Chemistry, and played a leading role in the discovery of Maraviroc, a CCR5 antagonist for the treatment of HIV, for which he was awarded the RSC Malcolm Campbell Prize in 2005, and was a co-recipient of the ACS Heroes of Chemistry Prize, the Prix Galien USA and Scrip awards in 2008 and the PhRMA Discoverers Award in 2010.

Tony Wood received his BSc in 1987 and PhD in 1990 in chemistry from Newcastle University, before completing post-doctoral studies with Professor Steven Ley, FRS at Imperial College in London working on the total synthesis of azadirachtin, one of the most complex molecules ever to have been synthesised, and a project that has only recently been completed.

Tony Wood has active interests in many areas of medicinal chemistry including G-protein coupled receptors, cyclic nucleotide processing enzymes, nucleoside and non-nucleoside antiviral drugs, serine and aspartyl protease inhibitors, protein transferases and kinases, protein-protein interactions and transcription factor regulation. Tony Wood is particularly interested in HIV, HCV and HPV therapies, and molecular virology from the standpoint of intervention of modulation of host targets, in particular the cellular targets necessary for viral fusion and activation of viral transcription.

Tony Wood has a highly successful track record of compound design and candidate delivery, including broad-spectrum antifungal agents, sub-type selective GPCR antagonists and potent cyclic nucleotide phosphodiesterase enzyme inhibitors. He has also been involved in the application of highthroughput synthesis and screening technologies to improve efficiency in drug discovery, and the use of yeast genomics to identify new targets for therapeutic intervention.

Tony Wood has held positions on a number of UK funding council review boards such as the BBSRC and EPSRC, and has recently been elected to the EPSRC’s Council, its top-level strategic committee. Tony Wood is co-editor in chief of the new RSC journal, Medicinal Chemistry Communications, and was editor of volume 41 of Annual Reports in Medicinal Chemistry in 2006. Tony Wood is an author or inventor on more than 50 scientific publications and patents, and has given invited lectures at a number of International Conferences on Medicinal Chemistry. Tony Wood is also a Visiting Professor at Newcastle University.

Klaus Müller studied chemistry at the ETH Zurich, where he obtained his Ph. D. degree in 1970 with Prof. Albert Eschenmoser. After postdoctoral work with Prof. Gerhard L. Closs at the University of Chicago, studying radical reactions by nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (CIDNP), he moved to Harvard University as a visiting lecturer (1971- 1974) on physical and theoretical organic chemistry.

By the end of 1974, he joined the scientific staff of the Laboratorium für Organische Chemie at ETH Zurich, where he did his Habilitation in 1977, focusing on molecular structure, energy, reactivity relationships and investigating the chemistry of a series of novel strained heterocycles, using photoelectron spectroscopy.

In 1982, he joined F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, Basel, in order to set up a molecular modeling group and to help implement biostructural research using macromolecular X-ray and multi-dimensional NMR spectroscopic analyses. In 1988, he became head of the Section “Computer-Assisted and Structural Chemistry, and, in 1991 head of the Departments of “Pharma Research Logistics & Support” and “Pharma Discovery Information Management”.

In these various functions, he has been instrumental in implementing and further developing computer-assisted molecular modeling and, together with Dr. Paul Gerber, developed the MAB force field and the molecular modeling software “MOLOC” that is today widely used not only at Roche but also in academics and other pharmaceutical companies.

During that period, Klaus Müller pushed computational chemistry, bioinformatics, structure-property analytics and correlation methodologies, bringing some of the finest scientists aboard at Roche and fostering intimate contacts with academia.

Since early 1998, he has been head of “Science & Technology Relations” in Pharmaceutical Research at Roche, Basel. In this function, he has acted as liaison person to both academic institutions and non-academic external groups and has been responsible for the search and early identification of young talents in chemistry and the life sciences. He founded the annual “Roche Symposium for Leading Chemists of the Next Decade” which rapidly became a honoring entry into the CV of those who were selected from all of Europe to attend.

He was a board member and Secretary-General of the Roche Research Foundation from 1999 till its conclusion at the end of 2008. Since 1990, he is Extraordinary Professor at the University of Basel, giving advanced courses on “Structure- and Property-Guided Molecular Design”; a lecture series that he also presented at ETH and, as invited “Robert B. Woodward Visiting Scholar”, in 2006 in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. He was promoted in Spring 2005 to “Roche Distinguished Scientist”, one of the first in this novel and highest scientific promotion category of Roche. After his regular retirement in Spring 2009, Klaus Müller continues to be affiliated with Roche as a consultant in chemistry and scientific matter, managing among others the new Roche Postdoctoral Program. At the same time, he has resumed his teaching activities at the ETH Zurich where he gives the main upper level “Physical Organic Chemistry” course.

Most importantly, over all these years, Klaus Müller has always been able to pursue his own research projects targeting the generation and introduction of new concepts in structure- based lead discovery and optimization. These scientific achievements are documented in more than 80 publications and in over 250 lectures, mostly scientific but also on science policy matters.