Aavinya Therapeutics
Dr. Rodney Harris
Dr. Harris has been hunting drugs since 2004. He has worked on many diverse projects using most of the computational tools available. With the advent of AI, he has started programming tools to assist in drug discovery. AI can be powerful, but you need someone who can pick the right directions through the jungle. He earned his PhD in Biochemistry at the University of California Riverside, did a post-doc in the molecular graphics lab at the Scripps Research Institute. After his post-doc, he started modeling consulting business: 1060 Discovery Engineering. Later, he worked for Samumed (now Biosplice) for eight years as a computational chemist supporting 8 medicinal chemists discovering drugs for cancer and other targets. Before returning to school for a PhD, he was an Aerospace Engineer and worked for the US Navy running thermal analysis computer models on missiles and shipboard systems.
Dr. G. Sridhar Prasad
Dr. Prasad has over 20 years of experience in the discovery and development of new molecular entities (NMEs). These NMEs have entered clinical trials and gained worldwide regulatory approval for the treatment of type 2 diabetes (Nesina®). Dr. Prasad is the founder and Principal Consultant of Nnavata LLC. Prior to founding Nnavata, he was the Director and Head of Protein Science at Ventus Therapeutics, Waltham, MA, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company deploying leading-edge structural biology and unique computational chemistry tools to develop a robust pipeline of novel medicines in immunology, inflammation, and neurology. Prior to joining Ventus Therapeutics, Dr. Prasad co-founded Plex Pharmaceuticals in 2009, which was acquired by Collidion, Inc. in 2017, and served as its Chief Scientific Officer from 2009 to 2022. Dr. Prasad joined Syrrx, Inc., a drug discovery company, in 2001, leading crystallography efforts that led to the discovery of Nesina®, a drug to treat type 2 diabetes. At Merck & Co. Inc., he was a lead crystallographer on key drug discovery programs, including those for schizophrenia, oncology and HIV-1 AIDS. Dr. Prasad obtained his PhD in structural biology from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India and Post-doctoral training from University of Minnesota Medical School, Minneapolis and the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California, where he grew to the ranks of Assistant Professor. Dr. Prasad has coauthored forty five peer-reviewed articles, reviews, and textbook chapters, and is a co-inventor of fourteen granted patents related to NMEs, devices and automation. He has deposited forty three X-ray crystal structure coordinates with the Protein Data Bank.
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