Biographical sketches of authors

Bohdan Waszkowycz   Protherics Molecular Design Ltd., Beechfield House, Lyme Green Business Park, Macclesfield, Cheshire SK11 0JL, United Kingdom (electronic mail: Bohdan.Waszkowycz@protherics.com). Dr. Waszkowycz received a B.Sc. degree in pharmacy and a Ph.D. degree in computational chemistry at the University of Manchester, then joined Proteus Molecular Design Ltd. (now Protherics) in 1990. He served as a molecular modeler on a number of structure-based drug design projects, most recently on the design of tryptase inhibitors, before leading the computational team in the development of the in-house software suite, Prometheus. The recent focus of the group has been the validation of software for high-throughput virtual screening, and Dr. Waszkowycz is currently responsible for establishing collaborative projects on virtual screening with a number of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

Tim D. J. Perkins   Protherics Molecular Design Ltd., Beechfield House, Lyme Green Business Park, Macclesfield, Cheshire SK11 0JL, United Kingdom. Dr. Perkins graduated from Cambridge with a B.A. degree in natural sciences and received a Ph.D. degree in medicinal chemistry from the University of London. He joined the Drug Design Group in the Pharmacology Department at Cambridge with Dr. Philip Dean, where he researched computational methods for conformational analysis and molecular superposition. This group formed the basis of the TeknoMed drug design collaboration with Rhône-Poulenc Rorer. On joining Protherics in 1998, Dr. Perkins has worked on software development within Prometheus, particularly in implementing tools for facilitating high-throughput virtual screening, including novel methods for analysis of receptor–ligand complementarity.

Richard A. Sykes   Protherics Molecular Design Ltd., Beechfield House, Lyme Green Business Park, Macclesfield, Cheshire SK11 0JL, United Kingdom. Mr. Sykes received a B.Sc. degree in logic with mathematics from the University of Sussex and worked as a programmer for a number of years before returning to academia to research the theory and application of functional programming languages at the University of London. Since joining Protherics in 1991, he has been the senior programmer involved in the development of Prometheus. He has a particular interest in the development of the scripting language Global and the design and implementation of graphical user interfaces to support the requirements of the group's structure-based design and virtual screening efforts.

Jin Li   Protherics Molecular Design Ltd., Beechfield House, Lyme Green Business Park, Macclesfield, Cheshire SK11 0JL, United Kingdom. Dr. Li is Head of Computational Chemistry at Protherics. He received a B.Sc. degree from Sichuan University, China, and a Ph.D. degree in macromolecular sciences from Aston University, followed by postdoctoral research in theoretical biochemistry at the University of Manchester with Dr. Barry Robson. He joined Protherics in 1990 to undertake research into computer simulation of protein folding and protein structure prediction. Since 1994 he has led the computational chemistry team in developing methods and software for molecular design, particularly in the areas of de novo design, molecular docking, and combinatorial library design. More recently Dr. Li was responsible for initiating and directing the DockCrunch project, involving a million compound virtual screen versus the estrogen receptor.