Dr. MacKerell to be honored at the ACS Spring 2022 National Meeting, March 20-24, in San Diego

March 10, 2022, Baltimore, MD – SilcsBio, a technology company that develops and markets software and services for structure-based drug design, announced today its Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Alexander D. MacKerell Jr., PhD, has been awarded the American Chemical Society (ACS) 2022 Award for Computers in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research.

Dr. MacKerell, the Grollman-Glick Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Director of the Computer-Aided Drug Design (CADD) Center at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, will be honored at the ACS Spring 2022 National Meeting in San Diego, March 20–24. On March 22, the conference will devote a full day of symposia covering a breadth of topics on computer aided drug design and computational chemistry.

“We’re proud of Alex – and this ACS award, to be sure, is reflective of his hard work and talent in the fields of CADD and pharmaceutical research and development,” said Ken Malone, CEO of SilcsBio. “Alex is a pioneer in how we use CADD tools in ways that fundamentally change our approach to drug design and biologics formulation, including real acceleration of the drug design process.”

The award, sponsored by the ACS Division of Computers in Chemistry, is being given for Dr. MacKerell’s profound impact in the fields of biomolecular simulations and computer-aided drug discovery.

Under Dr. MacKerell’s leadership, SilcsBio has built expertise in structure-based drug design, MD simulations and computational drug discovery for pharmaceutical companies and research organizations in need of computer-aided drug design services and support.

Last fall, SilcsBio was awarded a $1,760,531 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This NIH award, titled “Computational methods for optimized biologics formulation,” will enable SilcsBio to continue its work developing a rational formulation design technology using the SILCS computational method to allow screening of a large number of excipient/buffer combinations to accelerate and improve biopharmaceutical development.

About SilcsBio:
SilcsBio, LLC offers the SILCS platform technology that advances computational drug design applications through detailed protein mapping that accounts for flexibility and solvation and enables highly efficient ligand binding evaluation, virtual screening, and more. SilcsBio software and services span from target protein mapping and analysis through lead optimization and offers key insights for biological therapeutic formulations. The proprietary software unlocks hidden binding hotspots of target proteins and reveals the preferred ligand chemistries at those sites to rapidly guide the drug design process. SilcsBio most recently announced a partnership with AIkido Pharma. Learn more: www.silcsbio.com

Media Contact:
Tina Guvench
SilcsBio
tina@silcsbio.com
(410) 401-9794, ext. 701