Tuberculosis
Alzheimer's
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Philip Hipskind

Philip Hipskind

David Mendel

Karen Lobb

Renhua Li

Greg Durst

Cynthia Jesudason

Miles Siegel

Kenn Henry

Philip Hipskind

Dr. Philip A. Hipskind earned his BS at Indiana University. He then went on to get his doctorate in organic chemistry at Stanford University in 1991. While earning his Ph.D. he was both a Tamaki Foundation and an American Chemical Society Fellow.

Dr. Hipskind joined Lilly Research Laboratories as a senior medicinal chemist that same year. While at Lilly, he created a robust discovery and development portfolio spanning Oncology, Endocrinology, Neuroscience, and Infectious Disease, achieving 14 first human clinical dose milestones as well as 7 generically named clinical compounds – lanepitant, tradipitant, tasisulam, tildacerfont, taladegib, adomeglivant, and crenigacestat.

He holds 43 US patents with 9 additional patents pending and has authored over 50 peer-reviewed publications. He was also a founding member of the TB Drug Accelerator of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the TB Alliance. Dr. Hipskind was a long-time member of the Lilly Portfolio Management Team overseeing all pre-clinical and clinical phase assets for Lilly Research Laboratories and now is a member of the portfolio management team for the TB Drug Accelerator. Dr. Hipskind is also an Associate Professor of Medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine.

In 2017, Dr. Hipskind founded Lgenia Inc. Currently, Lgenia is a collaborating organization of both the TB Drug Accelerator as well as the Malaria Drug Accelerator. In addition, Lgenia is a collaborating partner for the NIH-sponsored TREAT-AD Center at Indiana University School of Medicine where Lgenia focuses on lead generation for novel neuro-immune targets for Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. Hipskind is the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Scientific Officer of Lgenia.

David Mendel

Dr. David Mendel earned his B.A. in Chemistry from Carleton College and a Ph.D. at CalTech. Thereafter, as an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Mendel expanded the boundaries of unnatural amino acid mutagenesis in Peter Schultz’s lab at the University of California, Berkeley.

Immediately following his postdoctoral appointment, Mendel joined Lilly Research Laboratories (LRL) where he contributed to a wide range of discovery projects in oncology, epigenetics, and inflammation. Mendel’s experience spans a wide range of chemotypes, scales, and techniques including rapid parallel synthesis, solid-phase synthesis, small-molecule protease and kinase inhibitors, antibody-drug conjugates, macrocyclic peptides, peptidomimetics, and multigram scale enzymatic resolution. At LRL, Dr. Mendel co-mentored visiting doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Pittsburgh. He holds 27 patents and was active at the bench for his entire career at Lilly, retiring as a Research Advisor.

Thanks to an excellent working relationship with his Lgenia colleagues and other TBDA partners, Mendel delivered several hit to lead (H2L) projects to the TBDA portfolio. He still enjoys chemistry troubleshooting and continues to mentor senior scientists outside of Lgenia in the practice of lead generation.

Dr. Mendel is a Senior Portfolio Director for Lgenia.

Karen Lobb

Karen Lobb has over 25 years of lab experience synthesizing, purifying, and analyzing organic molecules for biological structure-activity relationships (SAR).

She received her B.S. from the University of Louisville and an M.S. in Chemistry from Purdue University in Indianapolis. Lobb is experienced in multiple therapeutic areas; and her expertise includes lead generation, lead optimization, structure-based drug design, optimization of physicochemical properties, and interpretation of biological data.

Her SAR work has contributed to the discovery of five clinical candidates. Lobb was the first to synthesize Tasisulam, an antiproliferative drug. She has authored or co-authored 13 papers and is an inventor on 18 patents. She is excited to be working on critical unmet medical needs at Lgenia.

Lobb is a Senior Portfolio Director for Lgenia.

Renhua Li

Renhua Li has over 24 years of experience in Organic Chemistry, medicinal chemistry, and drug discovery experiences. He received his B.S. in Chemistry from Shanghai Normal University and his M.S. in Organic Chemistry from Eastern Michigan University.

Li joined DuPont-Merck Pharmaceutical Company (a joint venture formed by DuPont and Merck which was acquired by Bristol-Myers Squibb in 2001) in 1994. Renhua was one of the key contributors on the Eliquis (a blood thinner) discovery team. He also made contributions towards an HIV protease inhibitor drug candidate.

He began at Eli Lilly and Company in 2002, where he worked on several therapeutic areas including Neuroscience, Endocrinology, and Oncology. He has delivered four clinical drug candidates (One for cancer, two for diabetes, and one for the treatment of Psychiatric Disorders and Excessive Sleeping Disorder). He has authored or co-authored over 20 papers and is an inventor on 17 patents. He is excited to make new contributions to the discovery of new medicines at Lgenia.

Li is a Senior Portfolio Director for Lgenia.

Greg Durst

Greg Durst received his B.S. in Chemistry from Ohio Northern University and began his career at Ball Corporation Analytical Laboratories in Muncie, IN, performing analyses of metal beverage container coatings and polymer food containers. During his time there, he began his M.S. degree in Chemistry at Ball State University and completed a computational thesis. Durst then joined Eli Lilly and Company’s agricultural products division, (later to become Dow AgroSciences through a joint venture). There he gained proficiency in applying computational techniques to the design and discovery of bioactive agricultural chemicals while collaborating with organic chemists.

In 1998 he joined the drug discovery division of Eli Lilly in the Computational Chemistry group where he worked on applications for infectious disease and a variety of other targets. Durst is skilled in Structure-Based Design, cheminformatics, and predictive model building for biological endpoints. He has contributed to the delivery of 4 clinical candidates, is an inventor on 2 patents, and has authored or co-authored 16 scientific papers. He now hopes to make a valuable impact on the discovery of new TB drugs at Lgenia.

Durst is a Senior Portfolio Director for Lgenia.

Cynthia Jesudason

Dr. Cynthia D. Jesudason earned her B.A. from Oxford University and her Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry (on the first asymmetric synthesis of the complete daphnane skeleton) with Professor Paul Wender at Stanford University in 1995. She joined Lilly Research Laboratories as a medicinal chemist that same year.

Dr. Jesudason has both drug discovery and development experience for a diverse array of central and peripheral targets in neuroscience and endocrinology targeting Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, depression, alcohol abuse, sleep disorders, obesity, diabetes, and renal disease, resulting in the successful delivery of multiple clinical candidates. She also led a cross-functional team at Lilly in the design and development of receptor occupancy and PET tracers to quantitate both preclinical and clinical target engagement. This improved clinical translation and has advanced several tracers into the clinic.

She holds 26 issued US patents with 1 pending and has authored 9 peer-reviewed publications and 3 book chapters. Dr. Jesudason retired from Lilly as a Research Fellow and joined Lgenia in November 2019.

Dr. Jesudason is a Senior Portfolio Director for Lgenia.

Miles Siegel

Dr. Miles Siegel earned his B.A. in Chemistry from Dartmouth College in 1985. Following a two year stint as a small scale industrial chemist at Eastman Kodak, Dr. Siegel obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago under the mentorship of Professor Jeffery Winkler, where he researched photochemical approaches to the total synthesis of alkaloid natural products. Upon completing his Ph.D., he performed post-doctoral research in the labs of Professor Harry Wasserman at Yale University, studying the synthetic methodology of vicinal tricarbonyl compounds.

Dr. Siegel joined the Combinatorial Chemistry group at Eli Lilly in 1994, where he conducted pioneering research in solution phase parallel synthesis and its applications to the construction of molecular libraries and rapid SAR evaluation, with an emphasis on accelerating Lead Generation. For several years, he led Lilly’s High Throughput Medicinal Chemistry group, which focused on the use of robotics and automation to design and build SAR-focused libraries across the entire Lilly pre-clinical portfolio. Dr. Siegel has a breadth of medicinal chemistry experience, leading projects and contributing to efforts in neuroscience, endocrinology, migraine, pain, and oncology. He is a co-author of over 20 publications and is a co-inventor on 11 issued patents. After 26 years, Dr. Siegel retired from Lilly at the end of 2020 as a Senior Research Advisor.

Dr. Siegel is a Senior Portfolio Director for Lgenia.

Kenn Henry

Dr. Kenn Henry earned his B.S. in chemistry from the University of Michigan in 1987. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1994 from Indiana University in the lab of Professor Paul A. Grieco — studying natural product synthesis and synthetic methodology in organic salt solutions. Dr. Henry moved to Duke University and developed synthetic routes to the natural product azadirachtin as a Postdoctoral research associate under the direction of Professor Bert Fraser-Reid.

Dr. Henry joined Abbott Laboratories in 1995 in the Aging and Metabolic Diseases group, then moved to Eli Lilly in 1998 and initially joined the infectious diseases group. In addition to infectious diseases, his research interests included neuroscience and diabetes, emphasizing kinase inhibitors for oncology and autoimmunity.

In addition to his roles as a principal investigator in medicinal chemistry, Dr. Henry has experience as a certified Six Sigma Black Belt. He led a team for an automated synthesis laboratory and a lead generation group. Dr. Henry co-authored 19 publications and was a co-inventor on ten issued patents. He retired from Lilly as a Research Advisor at the beginning of 2022.

Dr. Henry is a Senior Portfolio Director for Lgenia.