AI in Drug Development Working Group

Bissan Al-Lazikani, PhD

MDACC

Bissan Al-Lazikani, PhD Professor, Genomic Medicine Director, Therapeutics Data Science MD Anderson Cancer Center

Bissan Al-Lazikani, PhD, is professor of Genomic Medicine and director of Therapeutics Data Science. She joined MD Anderson in 2021 and is a founding member of our Institute for Data Science in Oncology. She is a data scientist and drug discoverer with experience in academia and industry. She pioneered integrating multidisciplinary data and AI in drug discovery. She is the creator of canSAR.ai, the world’s largest public cancer drug discovery platform, now hosted at MD Anderson, and used by researchers worldwide. Before MD Anderson, she was Chair of Data Science and Drug Discovery at the ICR, UK. There, she led AI-based approaches for objective and systematic evaluation of therapeutic targets for cancer which led to several drugs in clinical and preclinical development. She studied in the United Kingdom where she earned a doctorate in computational biology from Cambridge University and a master’s degree in computer science from Imperial College.

Jason Cross, PhD

MDACC

Jason Cross, PhD, Institute Director, Structural and Computational Drug Design, Institute for Applied Cancer Science (IACS), MD Anderson Cancer Center

Dr. Cross joined MD Anderson in 2015 where he is Institute Director for Structural and Computational Drug Design in the Therapeutics Discovery Division. He leads the multi-disciplinary structural chemistry group in the Institute for Applied Cancer Science, which is responsible for recombinant protein production, biophysics, macromolecular crystallography, and cryo-electron microscopy, as well as the application of informatics to small-molecule drug discovery, including molecular modeling and simulation, cheminformatics, machine learning and AI. At MD Anderson, he contributed to the design of two molecules currently in clinical trials: ART-0380, an ATRi licensed to Artios Pharma, and BMS-986466, a SHP2i licensed to Bristol-Myers Squibb. Prior to MD Anderson, he was Head of Molecular Modeling at Cubist Pharmaceuticals, where he managed computational chemistry and structural bioinformatics resources, and co-invented CB-618, a broad-spectrum beta-lactamase inhibitor that advanced to Phase 1 clinical trials. Dr. Cross received his BSc degree in Biochemistry from the University of Windsor in Canada and his doctorate in Physical Chemistry from Wayne State University under the direction of Berny Schlegel.

Reid Powell, PhD

TAMU IBT

Reid Powell, PhD Assistant Professor Combinatorial Drug Discovery Program and High Throughput Flow Cytometry Program Texas A&M Institute of Biosciences and Technology

Dr. Powell is an Assistant Professor in the Gulf Coast Consortia’s Combinatorial Drug Discovery Program and High Throughput Flow Cytometry Program at Texas A&M Institute of Bioscience and Technology. He has a diverse set of research interests with expertise in cell and molecular biology, bioinformatics, and lab automation. This has been exemplified throughout his academic carrier where he initially received a Bachelor of Science (BS) in Biochemistry with a minor in Biology from Texas Tech University. He later went on to receive his PhD in Medical Science from Texas A&M Health Science Center, where he also completed his post-Doctoral research in the Drug Discovery area. Throughout his career, he has developed a wide array of biochemical, image-based, and flow-based high throughput screening platforms with accompanying analytical methods. This has included multiple fully automated image analysis routines as well as methods to contextualize high throughput screening data using integrative approaches that combine genomics, transcriptomics, chemical, and pharmacologic data sources. He has supported multiple early-stage drug developed and drug repurposing campaigns, which have been performed across multiple disease contexts including cancer, pathogenic infections, and neurologic disorders.

Anshumali Shrivastava, PhD

TAMU

Anshumali Shrivastava is an associate professor in the computer science department at Rice University. He is also the Founder and CEO of ThirdAI Corp, a company that is democratizing AI to commodity hardware through software innovations. His broad research interests include probabilistic algorithms for resource-frugal deep learning. In 2018, Science news named him one of the Top-10 scientists under 40 to watch. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Young Investigator Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, a machine learning research award from Amazon, and a Data Science Research Award from Adobe. He has won numerous paper awards, including Best Paper Award at NIPS 2014, MLSys 2022, and Most Reproducible Paper Award at SIGMOD 2019. His work on efficient machine learning technologies on CPUs has been covered by popular press including Wall Street Journal, New York Times, TechCrunch, NDTV, Engadget, Ars technica, etc.

Suzanne Tomlinson, PhD, MBA

Rice Univ.

Deepika Subramanyam, Postdoctoral Associate from Dr. Vinod Vijayan’s Lab, Department of Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine and CTRID, VA Hospital. Our group is focused on studying how the catalytic subunit of serine/threonine-protein phosphatase PP1-alpha in blood platelet modulate lung cancer metastasis. Ongoing studies suggest human platelets from lung cancer patients had increased PPI in platelets, and platelet-specific PP1ca knock-out mice had decreased experimental tumor metastasis. Our study suggests the potential for PP1Ca antibodies in cancer therapeutics.

Stanley Watowich, PhD

UTMB

Stanley Watowich, PhD, Associate Professor Biochemistry & Molecular Biology University of Texas Medical Branch

Dr. Watowich is an Associate Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at the University of Texas Medical Branch. He is also Founder & CEO of Ridgeline Therapeutics, a Houston-based biotechnology company developing transformative drugs that enable adults to age stronger and live healthier. He is an accomplished entrepreneur, inventor, educator, researcher, and developer of world-class innovative resources, including the global “DiscoveryingDengueDrugs-Together” project with IBM and the DrugDiscovery@TACC supercomputer-based drug screening portal. Among his prime interests is developing accessible drugs to treat chronic global health problems, including age-linked muscle degeneration and obesity. Dr. Watowich graduated from Carleton College, received his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Chicago, and was a research fellow at Harvard University before migrating to Texas.

Guo-Qiang Zhang, MS, PhD

UTHealth

Guo-Qiang Zhang, MS, PhD Professor and Distinguished Chair , Digital Innovation VP & Chief Data Scientist, Office of Data Science (ODS) Co-Director, Texas Institute for Restorative Neurotechnologies (TIRN) University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

Dr. Zhang is Vice President and Chief Data Scientist for UTHealth. He is a Professor in the Department of Neurology, at McGovern Medical School and Co-Director, Texas Institute for Restorative Neurotechnology. Prior to joining UTHealth, he was a Professor of Internal Medicine and Computer Science at the University of Kentucky, where he also served as the university’s inaugural Director for the Institute for Biomedical Informatics, and Associate Director for the Center for Clinical and Translational Science. His longest career stretch has been spent at Case Western Reserve University, where his role included Division Chief of Medical Informatics, CoDirector of Biomedical Research Information Management Core of the Case Western CTSA, and Associate Director for Case Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Zhang received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. His earlier research interests included theoretical computer science and the semantics of programming languages. In the last decade, his research has revolved around Human-Data Interaction (HDITM), achieved through the development of innovative software and web-based applications spanning the biomedical data lifecycle. Software tools include query interface for clinical research, data management software for clinical trials and biomedical research and tools for multi-site data integration. He led the development of data infrastructures and manages data resources, following the vision of NIH Data Commons, for the National Sleep Research Resource and for the Center for Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy Research, the largest and most comprehensive, wellannotated clinical data sets in the two disease areas. He also has a track record of research in biomedical metadata including ontologies and terminology systems, to bring them to bear on HDI. Dr. Zhang effectively brings cutting-edge computer science and informatics methodology to addressing biomedical data/big data challenges through the translation of theory, algorithms, methods, and best practices to functional and usable tools impacting the clinical research data lifecycle