KWF Consulting

About Kerry

From bench chemistry to research management, I have thirty years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry.

As the first medicinal chemist at ICOS I had the rare opportunity to build a small but top notch medicinal chemistry group. Along with our biology colleagues, we placed eight small molecules into development. Three of these remain in clinical trials: IC-776, IC-83/LY2603618, and CAL-101. Each of these drugs originated in-house as high-throughput screening hits.

Our group worked with a wide network of collaborators and contractors who contributed to our SAR programs: Abbott, Albany Molecular, Array Biopharma, Biogen-Idec, CombiChem, Coromed, Gateway Chemical (now IQSynthesis) Glaxo-Wellcome.

In 2007 I co-founded Afya World Medicines, a non-profit pharmaceutical company, whose work now continues through the leadership of Ed Kesicki and Joshua Odingo at IDRI.

SAR targets

PDE4

PDE 5,7,10

CRTH2 (DP2)

CCR5

LFA-1*

Chk1*

PI3K delta*

DNA-PK

PARP

Cdc7

NEK9 (Nercc1)

Class 1,3 antiarrhythmics

Calcium channel blockers

*drug in human trials

Cheminformatics and Computational Chemistry

Managed large HTS and registration databases with Daylight Chemical Information Systems' Thor and Merlin

Screened library for leadlike and druglike properties with computational tools

Virtual screening and ligand-protein docking with OpenEye programs

Scaffold-hopping with ROCS

Litigation Support

In 2002, Pfizer sued Lilly/ICOS asserting infringement of a broad-reaching patent on sildenafil (Viagra). I served as in-house chemistry consultant for the attorneys defending ICOS. The case was resolved in Lilly/ICOS' favor on re-examination.

An LFA-1 inhibitor containing the diaryl sulfide scaffold discovered at ICOS binds to an allosteric site

Source: PDB structure 3BQM from Biogen-Idec: Bioorg Med Chem Lett 2008 Oct 1;18(19):5249-51 .

Image generated by KWF using PyMol from Delano Scientific.

Medchem and more