Medicinal Chemist
Manager, CNS Discovery/Computational Chemistry
Southern Research Institute
2000 Ninth Avenue South
Birmingham, AL 35205
205-581-2822
ananthan@sri.org
Dr. Ananthan obtained a Ph.D. in Synthetic Organic/Medicinal Chemistry in 1984 from Gujarat University, India, and received further post-doctoral research training at the Ohio State University with Professor Donald T. Witiak. He joined Southern Research in 1987 where he is currently a Senior Research Scientist and Director of Computational Chemistry and Manger of the CNS Drug Discovery Group.
Dr. Ananthan's primary research interests include drug design, medicinal chemistry, organic synthesis, and application of computer-assisted methods. His research efforts involving the design and synthesis of potential drug candidates are targeted toward enzymes, membrane bound receptors (GPCRs), ion channels and neurotransmitter transporters of the central nervous system. These research efforts are primarily supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through investigator-initiated R01 grants and contracts. Dr. Ananthan also serves as a co-investigator on a number of projects and is involved in computational analysis and data-mining efforts that are associated with high-throughput screening (HTS) of molecular libraries for lead discovery and lead optimization.
Dr. Ananthan is a member of the American Chemical Society, the Society for Neuroscience, Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society, and the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists. He has played an active role in the Medicinal Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society and has served as a member of the Long Range Planning Committee. He is a reviewer for the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry and Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry Letters and is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Medicinal Chemistry - Central Nervous System Agents.
Current synthetic/medicinal chemistry efforts directed by Dr. Ananthan involve the design, synthesis and development of opioid ligands as novel analgesic agents. The pursuit of these efforts is based on emerging evidence indicating that compounds possessing mixed mu agonist/delta antagonist activities are likely to display analgesic activity devoid of tolerance, dependence and gastrointestinal side effects. The design of novel ligands with these dual interaction profiles is guided by structure-based drug design strategies using homology models of the target receptors and by predictive 3D-QSAR (CoMFA) models developed using functional activity data on a series of ligands possessing a morphinan scaffold.
In another project, drug design and synthetic efforts are being pursued to discover novel ligands possessing selective interaction profiles with the biogenic amine transporters (dopamine, norepinephrine and 5-hydroxytryptamine) for discovering compounds with the potential for therapeutic application in several CNS disorders including addiction.