Robert E. Babine

Dr. Babine, a biophysical organic chemist, has over 30 years of practical experience in structure-based rational design for drug discovery. He has played pivotal role for the discovery of Telaprevir (VX-950) and other clinical compounds from his medicinal chemistry and structure based drug design expertise. He has been involved in a number of full cycles of drug discovery as a senior member of Medicinal Chemistry groups and Computational Chemistry groups in both well established pharmaceuticals and startups where he built and directed an integrated X-ray crystallography and computational chemistry groups. He is active in developing computational and experimental tools for drug discovery based on subtle differences in 3D structure with a deep and broad knowledge of protein structures. In addition to rational drug design, rational protein mutagenesis was used to turn an inhibitor into a substrate. His current research includes using Structure Based Enzyme Engineering to create new catalysts for important organic transformations with various industrial applications. Dr. Babine holds a Ph.D. in synthetic organic chemistry from Brown University. He has produced more than 45 scientific publications and reviews on Medicinal Chemistry and Structure Based Drug Design and holds more than 15 U.S. patents. Dr. Babine’s current research interests include new applications of Structure Based Drug Design and Structure Based Enzyme Engineering.