Organic Reaction Mechanisms, Selected Problems, and Solutions

Professor William Groutas - expertise and research interests lie in the general areas of organic medicinal chemistry, structure-based drug design, mechanistic enzymology, drug discovery and development, and combinatorial chemistry. The study of human and viral proteases, and the role they play in health and disease, has been the unifying theme of our research program. My extensive experience in antiviral drug discovery and development has been primarily focused on the structure-based design of inhibitors of an array of viral proteases, including norovirus, picornavirus, SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV proteases. An integral component of our studies has been the application of an array of tools and methodologies, including structure-guided drug design, computational chemistry, X-ray crystallography and high-field NMR, to probe the mechanism of ligand-receptor interactions and to address fundamental questions related to the design of novel broad-spectrum antivirals that also display enhanced resistance profiles. Ongoing research projects in my lab are translational in nature and driven by a basic science component. A noteworthy highlight of our investigations has been the recent discovery of a small molecule therapeutic (GC376) that is currently in clinical development for the treatment of feline infectious peritonitis (FIP) and COVID-19. Dr. Athri D. Rathnayake - is a medicinal chemist with drug discovery research emphasis on viral infectious diseases, neurodegenerative diseases, oncology, and inflammatory diseases. He did his postdoctoral studies in the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University and is currently affiliated with Biotheryx Inc.