Translating Molecules into Medicines

Shobha N. Bhattachar is a Director in Small Molecule Design and Development at Eli Lilly and Company. She has a Bachelor's degree in Pharmacy from Bangalore University, India, and a Master's degree in Pharmaceutical chemistry from the University of Kansas. Prior to joining Lilly, Bhattachar worked for eight years at Pfizer in Ann Arbor MI, in the Research Formulations group. She has authored/co-authored 15 publications covering wide ranging topics in the field of Pharmaceutical Sciences. Her current interests include the discovery-development interface, clinical candidate selection and developability assessment, clinical formulation development and biopharmaceutical aspects of drug product design.John S. Morrison earned his doctorate in physical organic chemistry from the University of Western Ontario studying the photochemical mechanisms responsible for the light-struck reaction in beer.  After graduation John joined the Preformulation and Analytical Method Development group of Apotex Inc evaluating drug substances and novel drug product formulations.  He then transitioned to the Discovery Pharmaceutics group of Bristol-Myers Squibb characterizing early drug candidates and establishing delivery strategies for a variety of dosing routes and molecular modalities.  His current role bridges the discovery/development divide, collaboratively supporting multi-disciplinary discovery teams as well as determining and mitigating developability risks for potential clinical drug candidates.  John has also led several AAPS committees and co-organizes the ACS Drug Design and Delivery webinar series.David M. Bender is  a Senior Research Scientist in Small Molecule Design and Development at Eli Lilly and Co.  He received a B.S in chemistry from Miami University and an M.S. in organic chemistry from Colorado State University where he conducted research into the design and synthesis of novel antibacterial agents.  He joined Eli Lilly and Co. in 1998 as a synthetic organic chemist in Discovery Chemistry Research. In 2009, he joined the Product Research and Development organization, where he has focused on formulation development, small molecule developability, absorption modeling and alternate drug delivery. Mr. Bender is currently a group leader in the Product Design and Developability group, and is responsible for overseeing the design and manufacture of clinical drug product for small molecules entering Lilly's development pipeline. Daniel R. Mudra is Director of ADME at Eli Lilly and Company.  He earned his B.S. from The University of Dayton studying pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic effects of drug-impregnated implants and an M.S. from Loyola University Chicago investigating the biochemical regulation of the p38 kinase pathway.  He earned his doctorate in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from The University of Kansas developing in situ and computational models of absorption studying the effects of excipients on permeability, metabolism and transport.  Dr. Mudra began his industrial research career at XenoTech, LLC and has published on models of P450 induction and inhibition, drug absorption and PK.  Since joining Lilly, he has contributed to projects from target identification to clinical development across a variety of therapeutic areas.  He leads in the incorporation of mechanistic and physiologically based PK modeling including the use of molecular attributes to predict human clearance pathways.