Ouathek Ouerfelli

Dr. Ouerfelli has been at MSKCC for more than 27 years. After defending his PhD in Organic Synthesis at the University Pierre & Marie Curie in Paris, France, he had a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University working with Gilbert Stork. He then spent two years at the Suntory Institute for Bioorganic Research in Osaka, Japan under the mentorship of Koji Nakanishi and working on glutamate receptor structural requirements for activity. With Sam Danishefsky at MSKCC, he has started several collaborative bio-organic projects that led to his promotion to Assistant Laboratory Member within the Cell Biochemistry & Biophysics Program under the direction of Jim Rothman (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2013). As an Associate Laboratory Member he directed a chemistry team that produced 23,000 siRNAs over two years. This was part of collaboration between MSKCC and Amersham Biosciences (now GE Healthcare) towards a functional proteomic profiling of the human genome using loss of function. Since 2004, he has moved to his current position as Director of the Organic Synthesis Core which participates in all facets of basic research as well as R&D at MSKCC. His work spans total synthesis and modification of natural products, design and synthesis of chemical libraries, hit to lead development, polymorph stability as well as formulation and up to Phase I-enabling scale up of APIs, to name a few. His success is credited to creative interactions with surgeons, oncologists as well as basic scientists to bring about novel and original solutions to important problems.