Biomedical Engineer
and Biochemist
Based In Fort Worth, TX.

I am a graduate from Cornell University with completed course work in Biomedical Engineering and Biochemistry. My focus of study is the connection between protein structure and function and the creation of new therapies to treat diseases.

Science has always a passion for me and I have continued to explore the sciences through the interdisciplinary application of biomedical engineering and biochemistry. I chose to combine biomedical engineering and biochemistry due to my personal research into the biotechnology industry- particularly the pharmaceutical industry.

There are many questions surrounding the scope of different, distinct drug entities that can be developed to meet the world medicinal needs. This is provided by the fact that almost all drugs marketed have origins in 10 chemical scaffolds developed by medicinal chemists. The question of “how many more chemical structures to discover” remains a questions deserving a definition of what one means by “chemical structure.” Ligand based drug design is an area of interest that especially applies to me. In this method, knowledge of other molecules’ ability to bind to the target of interest lends information to what types of structures to explore and test on the target of interest. In other words, by knowing which molecules binds to a target, or related targets, tightly or not, it’s possible to modify these molecules until the desired affinity is achieved. The landscape of drug design/discovery is filled with a hope of much more to come. This hope roots itself on the idea that since most drugs have origin in a few entities, 10, could we not discover more entities? Nonetheless, the lack of new entity discovery, given the time and resources thus far placed in the activity of drug discovery, leads some to a pessimism. Further under current market considerations, the desire to risk real investigation to discover these revolutionary entities is held with much caution. Will these entities come? I believe they will. It’s only a matter of time before all pessimism is shadowed under a new wave of scientific ingenuity.

Due to these investigations and discoveries that there are very few drug entities, I decided to combine biomedical engineering with biochemistry in order to combine different fields of knowledge in an effort to create a new conceptual framework for applications into drug design. Since many drugs target proteins, I decided to focus particularly on proteins. I am an avid learner and I am always trying to gain new information on the development of drugs from scientific literature.