Joseph A. Maddry, Ph.D.

Biography

Dr. Joseph A. Maddry received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1985 from The University of Georgia, where he studied natural products chemistry, structure elucidation and purification, and X-ray crystallography. After postdoctoral studies at The University of Georgia and Southern Research, Dr. Maddry joined the staff at Southern Research. He has over 20 years experience in organic synthesis, including heterocycles, nucleosides, carbohydrates, oligonucleotides, alkaloids, and their analogs. He is Principal or Co-Principal Investigator of several NIH-funded grants relating to the development of drugs for treatment of mycobacterial diseases and AIDS-related opportunistic infections, and is also PI of an NIH National Cooperative Drug Discovery Group for design of drugs to treat microsporidiosis.

Much of Dr. Maddry's drug design research is focused on combinatorial chemistry and diversity library synthesis, and he has experience with solid-, solution-, and liquid-phase methodologies employing both robotic and manual protocols. He has designed libraries based on sugar, purine, oxazoline, pyridooxazole, pyridopyrimidine, and natural product (fumagillin) scaffolds. Dr. Maddry designed and set up both the Combinatorial Chemistry Laboratory and Molecular Modeling Laboratory at Southern Research. He has extensive experience in computational aspects of chemistry with knowledge of IBM, DEC, CDC, and Unix computer systems, and is responsible for hardware and software maintenance of this facility.

He is also one of the principal medicinal chemists in the Tuberculosis Antimicrobial Acquisition and Coordinating Facility (TAACF), a compound acquisition, repository, and data analysis program established by the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, aimed at the discovery of new drugs for the treatment of tuberculosis, biothreat agents, and emerging infectious agents including SARS virus.

Among other duties for the TAACF, Dr. Maddry is responsible for compound and library selection and acquisition, database design and maintenance (including chemical structure databases (ISIS and ActivityBase interfaced with Oracle),compound supplier and chemical literature databases (Microsoft Access)), and structure-activity analysis of biological results. He has experience in numerous anticancer, antiviral, antimicrobial, and cystic fibrosis drug development projects and in a U.S. Army cyanide toxicity prophylaxis program.

Dr. Maddry is also PI for a program established by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the NINDS High-Throughput Drug Screening Facility for Neurodegenerative Disease, where he is responsible for overall project management and particularly for design of libraries for screening against novel assays targeted against a range of CNS diseases. Another part of the NINDS effort involves assisting in the design, acquisition, and synthesis of 1000-2000 compounds that will form the Brain Institutes' Bioactive Compound Collection, a pilot effort related to the NIMH Molecular Libraries Roadmap initiative.

Dr. Maddry also directs the chemistry program of the Southern Research Molecular Libraries Screening Center Network (MLSCN) grant, a component of the NIH Roadmap Initiative, and helps lead the chemistry team as part of the Southeast Regional Center of Excellence in Biodefense (SERCEB) grant.