Manchester, UK, October 2012 – Conformetrix Ltd, a leader in optimising drug discovery and design, has expanded its medicinal chemistry team with the appointment of an experienced pharmaceutical researcher. Dr Thorsten Nowak joins from AstraZeneca, where he worked for 16 years in drug design and project management.
Dr Nowak, who has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and a first class chemistry degree from the University of Heidelberg, has worked across a range of therapeutic areas and drug targets. He joins an expanding team of medicinal chemists and NMR scientists at Conformetrix as it makes progress in its proprietary programmes and the application of its technology to the process of drug discovery.
Conformetrix’s NMR technology determines accurate three-dimensional structures – or conformations – of drug molecules in their bioactive states. This is achieved without the need for traditional structural information regarding the protein target of each drug and provides researchers with valuable information on how development-stage compounds are likely to interact with their targets. This new information should improve the efficiency and quality of the lead identification, lead optimisation and candidate selection stages of drug discovery programmes.