2018 Hall of Fame Inductees Announced— ACS Division of Medicinal Chemistry

doi:10.1515/ci-2018-0412

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2018 Hall of Fame Inductees Announced— ACS Division of Medicinal Chemistry

Published/Copyright: October 29, 2018

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From the journal Chemistry International Volume 40 Issue 4

Abstract

The American Chemical Society Division of Medicinal Chemistry is pleased to announce that four medicinal chemists, Paul Erhardt, John Katzenellenbogen, Yvonne Connolly Martin, and Emma Parmee, have been inducted into the ACS Division of Medicinal Chemistry Hall of Fame at the Boston ACS meeting. The induction ceremony was held on Tuesday, 21 August 2018. Two of them are IUPAC members.

Dr. Paul Erhardt obtained a PhD in synthetic medicinal chemistry from the University of Minnesota and did postdoctoral studies in drug metabolism at the University of Texas. He discovered esmolol, an ultrashort-acting beta- blocker, while at American Critical Care. Still saving lives today, esmolol is a prototypical “soft drug.” Its design strategy has been used by various companies to produce several other agents marketed for emergency medicine. At Berlex Labs, Paul rose from Section Head to Assistant Director of R&D, also becoming a US PTO-certified patent agent through self-study. A leader for considering ADMET properties during early drug discovery, Paul delivered numerous invited lectures and short-courses about drug metabolism. Transitioning into academia as a tenured professor, Paul became Director of the University of Toledo’s Center for Drug Design and Development (UT’s CD3) nearly twenty years ahead of today’s trend for such centers. He has received several research and teaching awards, and is now a Distinguished University Professor.

Paul is active in IUPAC, where he has served as President of the Division of Chemistry and Human Health, and upon completing his presidency, has received an award for “Outstanding Contributions to the Advancement of Worldwide Chemistry.” Paul has 125 publications, 50 US patents and 7 IND submissions. He remains especially gratified by the drugs he helped place in the clinic, and by the many individuals who chose his labs to further their education; namely 20 sabbatical visitors and postdocs from 9 nations, 25 graduate students, more than 50 undergraduate students, and 6 high school students as “CD3 Lab Shadows.”

Dr. Yvonne C. Martin retired from Abbott Laboratories as Senior Research Fellow of the Volwiler Society. She earned a BA in Chemistry and Biology from Carleton College in Minnesota, and completed her PhD in Chemistry at Northwestern University. Dr. Martin pioneered the application of QSAR, computational chemistry, and cheminformatics in the pharmaceutical industry during her 48 year career at Abbott, developing many new tools and methodologies along the way. She was arguably the first person to apply computational approaches in the pharmaceutical industry. She has authored or co-authored over 60 peer-reviewed publications, 40 book chapters, and 20 reviews. She has edited 6 books, authored the book Quantitative Drug Design, and is an inventor on 8 patents. She was a principal developer of the pharmacophore analysis programs DISCO and ALADDIN.

The medicinal chemistry community has been well served by Dr. Martin’s efforts. Dr. Martin has been a member of the IUPAC Medicinal Chemistry Division since 1971, and served as its Treasurer, 1980-1981. She has served on 11 editorial boards (including Journal of Computer Aided Molecular Design and QSAR and Combinatorial Science) and on NIH and NSF study sections. She was one of the founders of the Cheminformatics and QSAR Society (1989) and served as its chair from 2001-2005. Yvonne Martin is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Herman Skolnik Award from the American Chemical Society’s Division of Chemical Information (2009), and the ACS Award for Computers in Chemical & Pharmaceutical Research (2017). She was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1985), and a fellow of IUPAC (2000).

Left-to-right: Paul Erhardt, Tom Perun (Past President of the IUPAC Chemistry and Human Health Division), and Yvonne Martin.

Online erschienen: 2018-10-29

Erschienen im Druck: 2018-10-01

©2018 IUPAC & De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. For more information, please visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

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https://doi.org/10.1515/ci-2018-0412