Dwight MacDonald

Background

About Dwight MacDonald

My PhD research under Prof. Tony Durst at University of Ottawa and post doctoral research under Prof Leo A. Paquette at the Ohio State University were both involved with the total synthesis of natural products. Since then I have experienced a rewarding and stimulating career in medicinal chemistry at Merck Frosst Canada Ltd. As a medicinal chemist at Merck Frosst, I was involved with designing and preparing drug candidates for the treatment of asthma, COPD, inflammatory bowel disease, memory loss, nerve damage and hypertension. My medicinal chemistry experience also includes the design and preparation of radiolabeled and fluorescent labeled biological tools. I have also been involved with the analysis of animal tissue and fluid samples for both stable and radiolabeled molecules. My medicinal chemistry career continued with an exciting opportunity at Tranzyme Pharma to prepare many libraries of their MATCH™ technology macrocycles to follow up on hits obtained from Tranzyme's HitCREATE™ libraries. My organic chemistry experience was greatly broadened over this time, with amino acid synthesis, solid phase peptide synthesis and combinatorial library synthesis added to my repertoire. My goal is to continue a chemistry career by building on the extensive medicinal chemistry experience I have gained. I am most interested in contributing to the field of health care in the discovery of treatments or diagnostics for disease. Specialties: 1. Organic synthesis of drug-like small molecules including peptidic, peptidomimetic and macrocyclic molecules. inhibitors for 5-LO, FLAP, PLA2, PDE4, renin, agonists and antagonists of many key receptors 3. building structure activity relationships. interacting with structural biology, computational chemistry and drug metabolism experts to aid in molecule design. aiding biology and pharmacology in the design and execution of experiments. preparation of radiolabeled compounds (3-H, 14-C, 125-I)