͵͵

Award

Shoichet recognized for informatics tools for drug discovery

He won the ASBMB's DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences
Dawn Hayward
April 1, 2017

, a professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, won the . Shoichet works on the development of docking methods and screening libraries and applies these tools in particular to G-protein–coupled receptors.

Brian Shoichet
“My reaction to getting the award was excitement to have the work of the lab recognized, and melancholy remembering Warren Delano and his contributions. He came out of UCSF’s graduate program and made important scientific contributions as well as his contributions to open science. He was an ever more central member of our community at the time of his untimely death.”
– Brian Shoichet

The Shoichet lab seeks to improve on traditional docking methods with new tricks of the trade. His lab has generated several distinct binding pockets that mimic typical protein cavities with which a promising small molecule could dock. This allows even failed predictions to help in the search for targets that match each small molecule tested.

In addition, the Shoichet lab works with libraries containing millions of small molecules, looking to enhance these libraries with the addition of bio-relevant molecules. This elevates molecular docking projects to the level of traditional high-throughput screening methods.

A key test of these methods has been on GPCRs. The Shoichet lab, in collaboration with of the University of North Carolina, has characterized several orphan GPCRs, including GPR68. This work utilized another aspect of Shoichet’s toolbox, the chemical probe, which identified GRP68’s role in fear-based learning.

In his letter nominating Shoichet, UCSF colleague wrote, “Brian is distinct in that he has extended the reach of computational modeling to study protein-ligand interactions with enormous impact on drug discovery and enzymology.”

As the DeLano Award celebrates the development and dissemination of computational tools, of the University of Dundee noted in his letter of support for Shoichet’s nomination that Shoichet indeed fits the bill. “In the spirit of the ASBMB DeLano Award, Professor Shoichet has made multiple informatics platforms of his research readily accessible to the scientific community to accelerate their own research,” he wrote.

Shoichet earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry from UCSF. After postdoctoral fellowships at UCSF and the University of Oregon, Shoichet held a faculty position at Northwestern University before being recruited back to UCSF.

Shoichet won the PhRMA Foundation Career Award and the National Science Foundation Career Award. He also has served on the scientific advisory board for the National Institutes of Health RoadMap Chemical Libraries and Screening Initiative and the NIH Centers for Biomedical Computing.

Enjoy reading ASBMB Today?

Become a member to receive the print edition four times a year and the digital edition weekly.

Learn more
Dawn Hayward

Dawn Hayward earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Get the latest from ASBMB Today

Enter your email address, and we’ll send you a weekly email with recent articles, interviews and more.

Latest in People

People highlights or most popular articles

Guiding grocery carts to shape healthy habits
Award

Guiding grocery carts to shape healthy habits

Nov. 21, 2024

Robert “Nate” Helsley will receive the Walter A. Shaw Young Investigator in Lipid Research Award at the 2025 ASBMB Annual Meeting, April 12–15 in Chicago.

Leading the charge for gender equity
Award

Leading the charge for gender equity

Nov. 19, 2024

Nicole Woitowich will receive the ASBMB Emerging Leadership Award at the 2025 ASBMB Annual meeting, April 12–15 in Chicago.

Honors for de la Fuente, Mittag and De La Cruz
Member News

Honors for de la Fuente, Mittag and De La Cruz

Nov. 18, 2024

César de la Fuente receives the American Society of Microbiology’s Award for Early Career Basic Research. Tanja Mittag and Enrique M. De La Cruz are named fellows by the Biophysical Society.

In memoriam: Horst Schulz
In Memoriam

In memoriam: Horst Schulz

Nov. 18, 2024

He was a professor emeritus at City College of New York and at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan whose work concentrated on increasing our understanding of mitochondrial fatty acid metabolism and an ASBMB member since 1971.

Computational and biophysical approaches to disordered proteins
Award

Computational and biophysical approaches to disordered proteins

Nov. 14, 2024

Rohit Pappu will receive the 2025 DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences at the ASBMB Annual Meeting, April 12-15 in Chicago.

Join the pioneers of ferroptosis at cell death conference
In-person Conference

Join the pioneers of ferroptosis at cell death conference

Nov. 13, 2024

Meet Brent Stockwell, Xuejun Jiang and Jin Ye — the co-chairs of the ASBMB’s 2025 meeting on metabolic cross talk and biochemical homeostasis research.