Prema Iyer

As an organic/medicinal chemist, my expertise, training, motivation, and leadership will lead the research project successfully. I have more than fifteen years organic synthetic and medicinal chemistry experience of with US government (NIH), large pharmaceutical industry (GSK), and academic research related to anti-cancer and HIV drugs. As an organic/medicinal synthetic scientist on serval different university- and NIH-funded grants, and I have been focused on innovative research in the field of applied novel drug discovery, particularly relating to oncology targets. In addition, I successfully lead the projects on different research topics, collaborated with other scientists and collaborators from different areas globally, and published several peer-reviewed papers from projects. The above experience has afforded outstanding skills in multi-step synthesis, small molecule design, problem-solving, and team building.

1. Development, Design, and Synthesis for Bioactive Compounds
My primary contribution to drug design was the development of a new route for the synthesis of “sulfur”-containing heterocyclic compounds, especially sulfonamides and sulfamides. By inventing innovative and advanced synthetic methods, various heterocyclic derivatives were developed and screened for biological activities such as cancer and HIV. These results were published in several papers and these body works have cited in many other papers by scientists. I authored in different projects as a leading scientist or co-investigator in these studies.

2. Methods for Bioactive Sultam Library Synthesis
The major goal of this project is the continued design and development of chemical methods to enable the construction of libraries comprised of novel sulfur and phosphorus-containing small molecules termed S- and P-heterocycles with an emphasis on skeletal, stereochemical and functional group diversity. Initial efforts were aimed at the production of "drug-like" libraries for high-throughput screening (HTS) in order to maximize the probability of producing compounds with a high likelihood of interacting with macromolecular biomolecules.

My Current Research Focuses are
• Project 1. Development of small-molecule inhibitors for p62-multiple myeloma (MM)
• Project 2. Development of new allosteric modulators for CB2