Irwin
D. Kuntz, Ph.D.
 Dr.
Irwin D. Kuntz is Founder of the UCSF Molecular Design Institute and Professor
of Pharmaceutical Chemistry. He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the
University of California at Berkeley and taught at Princeton University
before joining the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the
University of California San Francisco in 1971. His research focuses on
structure based ligand design and docking algorithms. The major interests
of the Kuntz laboratory include determination of protein structure in solution,
fast folding processes in proteins, and structure based molecular design.
The laboratory developed the applications of distance geometry to use with
NMR data to determine protein structures in non crystalline environments.
The DOCK software program was also developed by the Kuntz group.
It uses database and graph theoretic techniques to suggest molecules which
have good steric and chemical complementarity to protein and nucleic
acid receptors of known structure. It has proven useful at UCSF and in
other academic and industrial laboratories in finding lead compounds in
the search for new drugs against viruses, bacteria and parasites.
Biographical
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