Prof. Rod Hubbard

Prof. Rod Hubbard has been at the University of York for over 35 years. During the 1980s, his main research interests were the development of molecular graphics and modelling methods, leading to the programs HYDRA and QUANTA which were used worldwide. Some of this work was while on sabbatical in Harvard where he worked with Martin Karplus, including some of the first use of computational methods to exploit fragments that can bind to protein active sites. During the 1990s, he helped to build and develop the York Structural Biology Laboratory as a major centre for protein structure analysis. This included many productive collaborations with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies such as Novo Nordisk, GSK, Celltech, Chiroscience, Pfizer, KaroBio and Peptide Therapeutics) working on therapeutically important proteins. This led to interests in exploring protein-ligand interactions and how to use protein structure for drug discovery. He took the opportunity in 2001 to spend some time at the company RiboTargets (now Vernalis) to establish structure and fragment based methods in a real drug discovery environment. He has continued to split his time between York and Vernalis. His personal research in York is on development and use of discovery methods for chemical biology and the three main research areas reflect the ESR projects available: (1) discovery of activators of industrial enzymes, (2) design and application of novel 3D fragments, (3) probing the bacterial replisome for druggable sites.

Website link: https://www.york.ac.uk/chemistry/staff/academic/h-n/rhubbard/