Kal Ramnarayan
Sapient Discovery, LLC, USA
Biography
Kal Ramnarayan, Ph.D. is Founder, President and Chief Scientific Officer of Sapient Discovery and co-founder of Focus Synthesis, LLC. He was formerly the co-founder, Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer of Cengent Therapeutics, Inc. Dr. Ramnarayan (Dr. Ram) was also the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Structural Bioinformatics, Inc. He was part of the management team that raised over US$50M from venture capitalists. In addition he has lead several projects with big-pharma and biotech companies resulting in over $US50M in revenues to the company making his division very profitable. He was the former Head of Computational Chemistry at ImmunoPharmaceutics Inc., where he contributed to the design of a highly active endothelin receptor antagonists (which has resulted in one approved drug in EU, Thelin and one in Phase III clinical trials, Sitaxsenten), TNF antagonists, and FGF antagonists. Previously, Dr. Ram was a Senior NIH Research Associate at the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla. He has authored numerous scientific papers on computational protein and peptide structure determination and protein structure-based drug design. He is also a co-inventor on U.S. Patent No. 5,571,821 and 6,541,498 covering small molecule endothelin receptor antagonists which entered the clinic in Oct. 1996 and U.S. Patent No. 6, 436, 933 covering the discovery of inhibitors of anthrax lethal factor activity. He has several patent applications pending. He is on the Advisory Board of IBM’s BlueGene program, Keck Graduate Institute and Strand Genomics. He is on the editorial board of Current Proteomics. Dr. Ram holds a Ph.D. degree in Molecular Biophysics from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India.