Brian Shoichet, Ph.D.

Brian Shoichet, Ph.D.

Professor, University of California, San Francisco

Brian Shoichet received his Ph.D. for work with Tack Kuntz on molecular docking in 1991 from UCSF.  His postdoctoral research was experimental, focusing on protein structure and stability with Brian Matthews at the Institute of Molecular Biology in Eugene, Oregon, as a Damon Runyon Fellow.  In 1996 he joined the faculty at Northwestern University in the Dept. of Molecular Pharmacology & Biological Chemistry, and was recruited back to UCSF in 2003, where he is now a Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry.  Research in the Shoichet lab seeks to bring chemical reagents to biology, using a combination of computational simulation and experiment. Using a protein-centric approach, new ligands are sought to complement protein structures. This typically involves molecular docking and the development of model experimental systems to experimentally test new algorithms.  A new direction adopts a ligand-centric approach that seeks new targets for known drugs and reagents.  Whereas this lacks the physical foundation of the structure-based docking, it returns to an older, pharmacological view of biological relationships, bringing to it a quantitative model.  A biological focus for both areas is the discovery of reagents to modulate GPCRs.  The research is largely funded by the NIH.