On Sunday, October 25th the College of Pharmacy hosted a research seminar for the master of science in drug discovery and development (MDD) sstudents. The seminar was given by Dr. Mohamed Elsayed, senior scientist and medicinal chemist at Pfizer Oncology, Colorado, USA.
Dr. Elsayed obtained his Bachelor of Pharmacy and Master of pharmaceutical chemistry from the college of pharmacy, Ain shams University, Cairo, Egypt. He did his Ph.D. at Purdue University under the supervision of Prof. Mark Cushman then he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign for Postdoctoral training.
His talk focused on some of the research work he has done that led to the discovery of several potential anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory compounds. He presented the story behind the design and synthesis of several novel compounds and also showed the results of the biological screening of these new compounds. One of the compounds he discovered in his Ph.D. is currently in phase I clinical trials at the NIH, USA.
After the talk and during the Q&A session several of our masters in drug discovery and development students had a fruitful discussion with Dr. Elsayed about his research and the compounds he worked on their design and synthesis.
Dr. Ahmed Thabet, the director of the MDD program and chair of the department of pharmaceutical sciences commented: it was a great pleasure having Dr. Elsayed as a speaker in the MDD seminar series and we are looking forward to more input and collaboration from him and other colleagues and collaborators from all over the world to our master’s program and our students.
Prof. Sherief Khalifa, Dean of the College of Pharmacy commented: Having Dr. ElSayed speaking to our master’s students was important to ignite their passion about drug discovery and development. The College strives to bring role modles such as Dr. ElSayed knowing the impact of such interactions on our students and the added vaue for our faculty and our college.