Andrew Stern, PhD
Director of Novel Therapeutics, Drug Discovery Institute, Associate Professor of Computational and Systems Biology
 Office: W957 BST |
State University of New York at Stony Brook B.S. Chemistry 1971 I joined the Drug Discovery Institute of University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine as the Director of Novel Therapeutics in September, 2012. My goal is to provide team-oriented therapeutics-focused scientific leadership to help guide highly collaborative multidisciplinary drug and biomarker discovery teams comprised of experienced professionals, fellows and graduate students. I have experience leading drug discovery teams in both the academic and industrial communities from an early discovery stage through clinical development and approval. Prior to joining the University of Pittsburgh, I served as the Associate Director, Novel Therapeutics at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. I co-led 5 cancer-related projects (please see corresponding publications below) and was responsible for designing and implementing several phenotypic screens and animal model studies in conjunction with integrative approaches to target identification. As one example we demonstrated that AURKA kinase was an essential negative regulator of polyploidization in acute megakaryocytic leukemia and through a novel target identification approach have been able to repurpose a clinical candidate for this specific indication. This study inspired the development of the Quantitative Systems Pharmacology approach used in the current proposal. As another example, we developed an extensive pharmacogenomic database involving the Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia (CCLE) with potential impact for patient stratification that associated activating mutations in beta catenin with sensitivity to navitoclax, a BCL2 family antagonist. In addition I co-led the effort to establish the Broad Institute as a MLPCN Core Screening Center. Before joining the Broad, I spent 17 years in the pharmaceutical industry with Merck and then DuPont/Merck Pharmaceuticals where I served as the Executive Director, Chemical Enzymology. In addition to playing a key role in the discovery, development, and approval of the nonnucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor for HIV, Sustiva, my team identified presenilin as the pharmacologic target of gamma-secretase inhibitors that led to clinical candidates for Alzheimer’s disease and oncology indication. In addition to experience developing drugs, I led the effort at Merck/DuPont that elucidated the mechanism of drug- induced thrombocytopenia by a class of fibrinogen receptor antagonists. Based upon these studies, we then developed a diagnostic test for predicting those individual patients at risk for developing thrombocytopenia thereby reducing the incidence from 2-5% to <0.1%. My 25 years of experience in drug and biomarker discovery and development, target identification, and physiologically relevant assay design will enable me to help our highly collaborative multidisciplinary team elucidate the mechanisms underlying tumorigenesis, metastasis, and resistance to therapy by identifying small molecules probes with the ultimate goal of developing novel therapies and biomarkers. My research team has collaborated and published together with the Oesterreich laboratory preclinical and clinical studies characterizing those ESR1 mutations acquired during estrogen deprivation therapy.
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