Michael Stocks

Contact

• workRoom C06 Biodiscovery Institute
  University Park
  Nottingham
  NG7 2RD
  UK
• work0115 84 66863
• Michael.Stocks@nottingham.ac.uk

Biography

I am a synthetic medicinal chemist with a PhD in organic chemistry under the supervision of Professor Philip Kocienski (University of Southampton 1991). I have over 20 years' experience in Medicinal Chemistry in the pharmaceutical industry through my career at Fisons, Astra and then AstraZeneca. I have worked in most areas of medicinal chemistry concentrating recent efforts on GPCR-based drug discovery projects most recently delivering AstraZeneca's beta-2 and muscarinic M3 inhalation projects into clinical development. I was appointed as project leader for designing and delivering chemical libraries (both targeted and diversity based) to enhance the AstraZeneca compound collection, a program that lasted for 4 years. During this time I worked with contract research organisations in China, Russia and India and recruited 2 industrial post-doctoral fellows to discover both new multi-component reactions delivering drug-like molecules as well as exploring the synthesis of new 3-dimesional scaffolds for use in medicinal chemistry. I have been co-author and inventor on over 50 publications and patent applications and recently co-authored a new "primer" book in medicinal chemistry: Stocks, Alcaraz and Griffen: On medicinal Chemistry.

In April 2012, I made the transition into academia and was appointed as Associate Professor in Medicinal Chemistry in the Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Structural Biology.

Research Summary

My research interests are focused on early stage drug discovery designing and synthesising new chemical scaffolds to interact with biological targets generating both high-quality tool compounds and… read more

Current Research

My research interests are focused on early stage drug discovery designing and synthesising new chemical scaffolds to interact with biological targets generating both high-quality tool compounds and lead-like compounds to probe biological targets and provide the starting points for successful drug discovery programs.

• Utilising synthetic and physical chemistry to address and overcome drug discovery issues such as; hit and lead optimisation, absorption, metabolism and compound selectivity.
• Conformational analysis and structure-based drug design.
• Fragment based drug design - designing and optimising high-quality fragments and libraries.
• Combining synergistic pharmacology's within a single small molecule.

Expertise areas:

Drug Discovery, Design, Medicinal Chemistry, Lead Optimisation & Identification, Multi-parameter Optimization, Inhalation and Oral delivery, Fragment & Structure Based Drug Design, ADME , Synthetic Chemistry.