Brian Oneill

Background

About Brian Oneill

Brian O'Neill is a Medicinal Chemist with expertise in Neurodegenerative and Psychotherapeutic discovery especially related to Alzheimer's disease and nicotine addiction therapy. Throughout his career, he has led cross departmental teams in the advancement of candidates to nomination, regulatory safety and clinical trials. He has mentored productive medicinal chemistry and process chemistry teams to work cooperatively towards advancing synthetic goals. His expertise and focus are in finding or following leads by understanding binding interactions or functional response and by designing synthetic routes to define SAR. He designs versatile templates that can efficiently access key vectors defined by structure-based design in good physical property space. He has background in process chemistry, uses mechanistic organic chemistry and has worked on challenging targets such as multi-step penem and quinolone antibacterials, BACE inhibitors as well as NK1 antagonists, kinase inhibitors and nicotinic partial agonists. He has developed natural product leads to build an understanding of the structural basis behind nicotine partial agonist for smoking cessation. He has used SBDD to design kinase and aspartic acid protease inhibitors. Brian also led a $500k 2-year collaboration with MIT and UPENN to discover methods for Csp3-Csp2 coupling. Brian is seeking consulting roles in drug discovery where he can guide teams towards efficient prosecution of SAR programs in neuroscience or oncology programs especially where it has been difficult to find enabling synthetic chemistry, permeable or CNS penetrant matter.