Drug Discovery & Development Keynote Speakers

Rathnam Chaguturu Founder and CEO/Senior Director, SRI International Rathnam Chaguturu is the Founder & CEO of iDDPartners, a nonprofit think-tank focused on pharmaceutical innovation. He has more than thirty-five years of experience in academia and industry, managing new lead discovery projects and forging collaborative partnerships with academia, disease foundations, nonprofits, and government agencies.. He is the Founding President of the International Chemical Biology Society, a Founding Member of the Society for Biomolecular Sciences, and Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Combinatorial Chemistry and High Throughput Screening. He serves on several editorial- and scientific advisory boards, recipient of several awards, and is a sought-after speaker at major national and international conferences, passionately advocating the virtues of collaborative partnerships in addressing the pharmaceutical innovation crisis. ‘Collaborative Innovation in Drug Discovery: Strategies for Public and Private Partnerships,’ edited by Rathnam with the Foreword by Ferid Murad, the 1998 Nobel Prize winner in Medicine, has just been published by Wiley.
Haian Fu Professor and Director, Emory University Haian Fu, PhD, Professor of Pharmacology, Hematology & Medical Oncology, is the Director of the Emory Chemical Biology Discovery Center and Leader of the Discovery & Developmental Therapeutics Program at the Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University. He serves on two national steering committees in the US, the National Cancer Institute’s Chemical Biology Consortium (CBC) Steering Committee and the NCI Cancer Target Discovery & Development (CTD2) Network Steering Committee. Dr. Fu is the President of the International Chemical Biology Society. Dr. Fu received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1989 after BS from Anhui University, carried out his postdoctoral training at Harvard University where he became an Instructor in 1991, and joined the Department of Pharmacology of Emory University in 1994. Dr. Fu’s research focuses on protein-protein interactions in signal transduction, targeting these interactions for drug discovery, and collaborating with physician scientists to translate such bench research to clinical applications. Beside publishing original research in prestigious journals, Dr. Fu edited the widely-circulated books on “Protein-Protein Interactions” (2004) and “Chemical Genomics” (2012) and serves as Associate Editor for “Molecular Pharmacology”. He has been recognized by various honors including the PhRMA Faculty Development Award, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund New Investigator Award, the GRA Distinguished Investigator Award, the Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Cancer Scholar, and teaching/mentor awards from Emory University (2000, 2006, and 2011). He served on various national and international review panels, including the US NIH site visit team for NCI laboratories, Chinese Academy of Sciences site visit team, UK Cancer Research review panel, and Canadian Genomics Review Panel. 2012-2-1 Held position of President of the Chemical Biology Society
Kattesh V. Katti Director, Institute of Green Nanotechnology / Radiology / Cancer Nanotechnology Platform, University of Missouri Professor Kattesh V. Katti is internationally recognized as a leader in the interconnecting fields of—chemistry, radiopharmaceutical sciences, nanotechnology/green nanotechnology and nanomedicine—for biomedical applications, specifically for molecular imaging and therapy of living subjects. The impact of Dr. Katti’s work is widespread, as his pioneering discoveries and strategies, originally developed in his laboratory in bioconjugate chemistry and Nanomedicine, and green nanotechnological tools, are used in many laboratories, industries and hospitals around the world. His contributions in nano and green nanotechnologies have already created a transformative progress in nanomedicine by aiding molecular imaging to help diagnose and manage therapy—all at the cellular levels. Dr. Katti’s ground breaking discoveries in green nanotechnology where he has demonstrated that biocompatible nanoparticles can be produced without the intervention of any toxic chemicals, through phytochemicals of high antioxidant capacities and tumor receptor specificities have created a new generation of molecular imaging and therapeutic nanoceuticals. His approach to green nanotechnology has furthered the scope of holistic and integrative medicine with implications in modulating signaling pathways allowing optimization of therapies targeted to tumor cells/regions without causing adverse toxic effects to normal cells. These original discoveries are expected to have a major impact on how molecular imaging and therapies will eventually be individualized to allow their greater success through theranostic approaches using radioactive nanoparticles, photothermal therapy using targeted nanoparticles and novel therapies involving phytochemicals. Myriad of such approaches developed by Dr. Katti are already impacting clinical translation through comparative oncology in realistic ways as new drugs are being validated for their efficacy in imaging and therapy using tumor bearing dogs where the disease mimics human conditions. In recognition of his original contributions, Dr. Katti has been awarded a number of international awards and citations which include: International Hevesy Medal Award (2015) for excellence in Nuclear Sciences; Elected to the fellowship of the National Academy of Inventors (2015); One of the ‘25 Most Influential Scientists In Molecular Imaging in the World’ award by RT Image, the ‘Father of Green Nanotechnology’ citation by the Nobel Prize Winner Norman Borlaug, Gauss Professorship—Hall of Fame—from the Gottingen Academy of Sciences, ‘Outstanding Scientists Fellows’ award and induction as a Fellow of the Academy of Science, St Louis—one of the oldest scientific academies of the world and many more. In 2013, Dr. Katti was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science with a citation “for distinguished contributions encompassing nanoscale chemistry, particularly for ground breaking discoveries enabling application of nanotechnology concepts for biomedical applications”. His unprecedented discovery of the production of tumor specific gold nanoparticles through 100% green processes have been cited as the Editor’s choice in Nature, Future Medicine, in Science (AAAS), in Popular Science, by the Discovery Channel and have been highlighted in scientific/medical programs of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC, London).