News/Archives

6/14/18 – Congratulations to Alex on his keynote review article "The A-Z of Zika drug discovery," which was just accepted for publication in Drug Discovery Today!

6/05/18 – Congratulations to Alex and Jimmy on their manuscript "Naive Bayesian models for Vero cell cytotoxicity," which was just accepted for publication in Pharmaceutical Research!

4/20/18 – Congratulations to Alex on our accepted paper in Molecular Pharmaceutics entitled "Comparing and validating machine learning models for Mycobacterium tuberculosis drug discovery."

3/06/18 – We are happy to announce a recently funded NIH STTR grant to further our antitubercular drug discovery studies. It was highlighted by the press and by an Inside NJMS article.

3/05/18 – Congratulations to Jimmy Patel!! Jimmy passed his qualifying exam with flying colors. Consequently, Jimmy is now officially an M.D. / Ph.D. Candidate.

1/24/18 – Congratulations to Alex for his contributions to a book chapter on Bayesian models in the recently published Computational Toxicology: Risk Assessment for Chemicals.

1/08/18 – Congratulations to Daigo, Alex, and former group members on their paper published at AAC! The manuscript is entitled "Novel pyrimidines as antitubercular agents."

9/14/17 – Congratulations to Tom, Alex, Shao-Gang, and Jimmy on their manuscript in ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters entitled “Addressing the metabolic stability of antituberculars through machine learning.”

9/6/17 – Congratulations to Jimmy on his fellowship award through the T32 training program in Infection, Immunity, and Inflammation!

9/1/17 – We are very excited to welcome master’s student Tenesha Body and Rutgers undergraduates Matthew Sherwood and Ethan Morrison to the group!

8/28/17 – Congratulations to Daigo, Ricardo, and Mark on their joint paper with the Brady lab in ACS Infectious Diseases, entitled “Human microbiome inspired antibiotics with improved β-lactam synergy againstMDR Staphylococcus aureus."

8/28/2017 – Congratulations to Dr. Nisha Mittal on her new Senior Scientist position in the Analytical department at Kashiv Pharma.

8/14/2017 – Congratulations to Jimmy for having his bio. featured on the Rutgers Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology website, in the section with information for prospective students.

7/21/2017 – Congratulations to Shao-Gang on the acceptance of our manuscript in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, entitled "Mycobacterium tuberculosis L,D-transpeptidases are susceptible to inactivation by carbapenems and cephalosporins but not penicillins."

7/01/2017 – Congratulations to Joel (and to the lab, of course!) on the award of tenure!! The trip to Puerto Rico will have to wait, though; many more papers are yet to be written....

6/26/2017 – Congratulations to Ashley on starting a neurology residency at Tufts!!

6/16/2017 – Congratulations to Xin on his poster at the Boston Bacterial Meeting on our new results studying the intramycobacterial metabolism of antitubercular agents.

6/15/2017 – Congratulations to Jimmy on his talk at the Boston Bacterial Meeting on our recent efforts with methicillin-resistant S.aureus (MRSA).

6/09/2017 – Congratulations to Sam on his acceptance to the Rutgers-New Jersey Medical School. We know he will be an amazing M.D. in just a few years!

6/02/2017 – Congratulations to Divya on her new position as a Scientist at the Infectious Disease Research Institute (IDRI). We wish her the best of luck!

5/17/2017 – Congratulations to Divya on the acceptance of her paper in Trends in Microbiology, entitled "Antimycobacterial metabolism: Illuminating Mycobacterium tuberculosis biology and drug discovery," which outlines our thoughts on the intrabacterial metabolism of small molecule antituberculars.

3/24/2017 – Congratulations to Joel on the acceptance of his collaborative manuscript with the Jacobs lab! The paper, which is entitled "Enhanced respiration prevents drug tolerance and drug resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis," was just accepted for publication in PNAS!

1/19/2017 – The Freundlich laboratory is pleased to announce funding from the New Jersey Health Foundation for a collaboration with our Rutgers colleague, Professor Tibor Rohacs.

1/09/2017 – Congratulations to our alumni, Misun, who started working as a Biotechnology Patent Agent at Mintz Levin.

1/06/2017 – Congratulations to Daigo on his paper being acepted at JACS, which is entitled "Antimicrobials inspired by nonribosomal peptide synthetase gene cluster."

1/06/2017 – Congratulations to Nisha, Shao-Gang, Alex, and Divya on their paper being accepted at mBio, which is entitled "A novel small-molecule inhibitor of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis demethylmenaquinone methyltransferase MenG is bactericidal to both growing and nutritionally deprived persister cells."

11/04/2016 – Congratulations to Alex and Joel for their recent news article in the fall 2016 issue of Stanford's "Biomedical Computation Review," by Alexander Gelfand. See pages 7-8, the section "Going Viral on the Grid," for a description of the OpenZika project.

11/04/2016 – The first project update for OpenZika was posted on the World Community Grid website. Click this link to learn about the progress that we have made thus far and to find a molecular animation that highlights compounds from the first set of candidates we identified in the OpenZika calculations.

9/01/2016 – Congratulations to Alex and to our collaborators Sean Ekins and Carolina Andrade on their paper entitled "OpenZika: An IBM World Community Grid Project to Accelerate Zika Virus Drug Discovery," which was just accepted for publication in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

8/31/2016 – Congratulations to Shao-Gang and Alex on their Nature Chemical Biology paper, entitled “Non-classical transpeptidases yield insight into new antibacterials,” being accepted today!

8/16/2016 – Congratulations to Joel, to our collaborator, Dr. Sean Ekins, and to the lab! We just earned a new STTR grant to advance one of our TB projects. See the article "Collaborations Pharma, Inc. And Rutgers Announce NIH Award to Develop Treatments for Tuberculosis" to learn more. We are indebted to the NIH/NIAID for their continued support.

8/15/2016 – Congratulations to Daigo, Mark, Ricardo, and Shruthi on their Nature Chemical Biology paper!! It is entitled “Discovery of MRSA active antibiotics using primary sequence data from the human microbiome.” A news article about this paper is available at the following link, "New antibiotic mined from human gut reverses drug resistance in superbugs."

8/06/2016 – Congratulations to Alex and Sean Ekins on their recent JCIM paper, which was honored with the July issue's cover!

8/01/2016 – Welcome our new post-doctoral scientist, Dr. Ravindra Jadhav!

6/22/2016 – Congratulations to Alex Perryman, our long-time collaborator Sean Ekins, and Joel on their just accepted paper in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, entitled “Machine Learning Model Analysis with Small Molecules Tested in a Mouse Model of Mycobacterium tuberculosis Infection (2014-2015).” We believe these new consensus workflows that combine our machine learning models are useful for predicting in vivo activity in the mouse model of M. tuberculosis infection. Please contact us to test them out!

5/18/2016 – Congratulations to Tom Stratton, who graduated today from the Rutgers Honors College Summa Cum Laude!! We are so thrilled for him and proud of him, as he departs to join Professor Phil Baran's lab at The Scripps Research Institute as a graduate student in their chemistry Ph.D. program.

5/18/2016 – Congratulations to Alex and Joel, for the successful launch of the new OpenZika project on IBM's World Community Grid! This multi-national collaboration is searching for a cure for the Zika virus, by harnessing the dormant computer power from millions of computers and Android devices around the world. OpenZika is lead by Professor Carolina Horta Andrade (PI), Dr. Sean Ekins (Co-PI), and Dr. Alex Perryman (Co-PI). Please join World Community Grid and support our drug discovery research against Zika. Update: from mid-May to mid-August, we performed over 440 million different docking jobs with OpenZika!!

News videos about our new OpenZika project are as follows:

"Anyone with a computer can now help scientists find a cure for the Zika virus," FiOS1 News, reported by Raven Santana, May 19, 2016

"Rutgers University scientists want public to help with Zika research," News12 New Jersey, reported by Christopher Keating, May 20, 2016

"OpenZika Project Uses Public to Help Find Zika Virus Cure," NJTV News (PBS), reported by Michael Hill, May 25, 2016

Radio clip:

"Rutgers researchers seek computing help in quest for Zika treatment," WHYY (NPR) radio, reported by Taunya English, May 31, 2016

News articles about OpenZika:

"Rutgers researchers using power of Web to help stop Zika," Bergen Record, by Lindy Washburn, May 19, 2016

"Rutgers scientists aiding in Zika research project," Washington Times, by the Associated Press, May 19, 2016

"How you and your laptop can help Rutgers tackle the Zika virus," Star-Ledger, by Kathleen O'Brien, May 19, 2016

"Fighting the Zika virus with the power of supercomputing," World Pharma News, May 19, 2016

"Fight Zika by making your smartphone into a supercomputer," CNBC, by Dan Mangan, May 19, 2016

"OpenZika project uses supercomputing power to identify potential drug candidates to cure Zika virus," News-Medical.Net, May 19, 2016

"'Everyone Wants to Contribute:' Rutgers Scientists Aid in Zika Research," NBC10 Philadelphia, May 20, 2016

"International Business Machines Corp Jumps to Fight Zika Virus; Here’s How," Business Finance News, by Raheel Farooq, May 20, 2016

Carolina, Sean, and I contributed a Science Reddit Ask Me Anything, entitled "We are 3 scientists who are collaborating on an open science project to find treatments for Zika."

5/04/2016 – Congratulations to Tom Stratton for receiving the Harold A. Fales Memorial award, selected by the faculty for the top chemistry major graduating from Rutgers University – Newark!!

4/18/2016 – Congratulations to Alex Perryman on his appointment to the Advisory Board of Montclair State University's NSF TUES Type 1 grant: Incorporation of Research Skills into the Undergraduate Biochemistry Curriculum to Create Extraordinary Scientists for the Modern Research Environment. After Alex gave a one hour, invited seminar to the Sokol Institute of Pharmaceutical Life Sciences at Montclair State University on March 31, 2016, he was then invited to join this Advisory Board.

3/01/2016 – Congratulations to the group on an NIH R33 grant to support their discovery and evolution of M. tuberculosis pathway-specific chemical tools.

3/01/2016 – Congratulations to the group on an NIH R33 grant to support their development of novel chemical tools to probe M. tuberculosis peptidoglycan biosynthesis.

2/29/16 – Welcome our new lab member: Dr. Srinivasan Kandasamy just joined the lab as a post-doctoral fellow!

2/10/16 – Congratulations to Joel and long-time collaborator Sean Ekins for the publication of the extension of their computational methods to the Ebola Virus: “Machine Learning Models Identify Molecules Active Against the Ebola Virus In Vitro,” F1000Research, 2016, 1091. PMID: 26834994

10/6/2015 – Congratulations to Shao-Gang, Nisha, Xin, and Tom on their paper being accepted for publication in PLoS ONE! The paper is entitled “Combining Metabolite-Based Pharmacophores with Bayesian Machine Learning Models for Mycobacterium tuberculosis Drug Discovery."

9/21/2015 – Congratulations to Alex and Tom on the publication of our machine learning models for predicting mouse liver microsomal stability! Our manuscript was just accepted for publication in Pharmaceutical Research. Please feel free to contact us for the curated datasets (which we used to construct and validate our models) and/or to have your compounds confidentially scored for this important ADME property.

9/08/2015 – Welcome our new lab member: Dr. Ricardo Gallardo-Macias just joined the lab as a post-doctoral fellow!

8/20/2015 – Congratulations to Alex Perryman, Shao-Gang Li, Divya Awasthi, Tom Stratton, and Joel Freundlich for presenting their research at the 250th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society! Joel gave a talk, Alex gave a talk and presented a poster twice, and Shao-Gang, Divya, and Tom each presented a poster in Boston.

Shao-Gang Li, Divya Awasthi, and Alex Perryman at Divya's poster presentation, on the last night of the ACS conference.

7/08/2015 – Congratulations to Jimmy Patel!! Jimmy just found out that he passed the 9-hour long, USMLE Step 1 board exams. In addition, Jimmy officially joined the lab today. We welcome him to the group as its first M.D./Ph.D. student.

6/24/2015 – Congratulations to Xin Wang!! Xin passed his oral exam with flying colors. Consequently, he is now officially a Ph.D. Candidate.

6/15/2015 – Congratulations to Monica Anisetti! She was accepted to the Rutgers University-New Jersey Medical School and will be attending it this fall.

6/01/2015 – Welcome our two new labmembers: Mark Jaskowski just joined the lab as a Research Teaching Specialist III, and Jimmy Patel is an M.D./Ph.D. student who started a rotation with us.

5/26/2015 – Congratulations to Ashley Weng for sucessfully defending her thesis!! Since she has now finished the Scholars Program, she is returning to her 3rd year of medical school. We are sad to see her leave the lab, but we are glad that she achieved her research goals. We wish her the best of luck on her path to becoming a "real doctor."

5/21/2015 – Congratulations to Joel and our collaborator Sean Ekins for publishing a new paper in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling entitled "Open Source Bayesian Models: I. Application to ADME/Tox and Drug Discovery Datasets."

5/15/2015 – Congratulations to Joseph Bilotta!! Joe just left our lab to start a new position as a Field Service Specialist at Metrohm USA, covering the Northern New Jersey area. We are sad to see him leave, but we are happy for him that he'll get to start a new stage of his career.

5/13/2015 – Congratulations to Shao-Gang on his just-accepted publication in PLoS ONE with collaborators at the University of Rochester Medical School, entitled "A high throughput screening assay for anti-mycobacterial small molecules based on adenylate kinase release as a reporter of cell death"!

4/07/2015 – Congratulations and farewell to Steve Paget! In mid-April, Dr. Paget will be leaving our lab and starting a new position, as a Team Leader in the Medicinal Chemistry Department at Venenum Biodesign.

4/07/2015 – Congratulations to Tom Stratton! 80 faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students will be presenting their research at the Newark Research Day on April 17th, 2015. Tom was one of only two undergraduates whose research was highlighted in this news article.

3/01/2015 – Welcome our new post-doctoral scientist Daigo Inoyama!

2/27/2015 – Congratulations to Shao-Gang Li and Xin Wang, in addition to former group members Hiyun Kim and Monica Anisetti, on acceptance of their paper entitled "Evolution of a thienopyrimidine antitubercular relying on medicinal chemistry and metabolomics insight” in a special issue of Tetrahedron Letters. It is being published in the memorial issue for Professor Harry H. Wasserman, who Joel had the honor of working for as an undergraduate.

1/30/2015 – Congratulations to Alex L. Perryman, Xin Wang, Shao-Gang Li, and Professor Joel Freundlich on their new paper with the Olson and Tonge groups! This paper, which was just accepted to the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, presents a virtual screen against Mtb InhA that discovered novel, fragment-sized inhibitors. ALP was both the first author and the corresponding author for this paper, which was an extension of the GO FAM project. Click here to read a News Article that summarizes our new JCIM paper.

1/14/2015 – Congratulations to Tom! Tom was recently awarded both The Lipkin Scholarship and the William F. Singletary Scholarship for the Sciences.

11/14/2014 – Congratulations to Joel and long-time collaborator Sean Ekins on the publication of an extension of their cheminformatics methods to aid in the search for novel therapeutics versus the Ebola virus.

10/23/2014 – Congratulations to Tom! Tom's biography was featured in Rutgers Today. Read it here to learn about his rock 'n roll career and to listen to some of the music that he helped create.

9/24/2014 – Congratulations to Alex on a group contribution to a large, multinational collaborative effort leading to an accepted paper in PLoS ONE entitled, "Identification of a novel drug lead that inhibits HCV infection and cell-to-cell transmission by targeting the HCV E2 glycoprotein!"

9/17/2014 – Congratulations to Alex for being selected to present his research in a talk at the Rutgers/Robert Wood Johnson Medical School's 6th Annual National Postdoc Appreciation Day Symposium, in Piscataway, NJ.

9/16/2014 – Congratulations to Joel and the group for earning a grant from the Charles and Johanna Busch Memorial Fund.

8/20/2014 – The website for our NIH-funded CETR is now live. Please visit http://njms.rutgers.edu/research/cetr/.

8/01/2014 – Congratulations to Tom Stratton for giving a great presentation at the successful completion of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship, which funded his research for the last few months.

8/01/2014 – Congratulations to Alex Perryman and Xin Wang on their paper with the Kozikowski, Jacobs, and Bishai groups on novel inhibitors of InhA, which was just accepted in ChemMedChem. Our contribution was performing molecular modeling, enzyme biochemistry and inhibition assays of the new small molecule inhibitors.

7/21/2014 – Congratulations to Tom Stratton, who was recently distinguished as an Anna and Bernard Senkowski Undergraduate Chemistry Scholar.

7/14/2014 – Congratulations to Alex for updating IBM's World Community Grid volunteers on promising results from GO FAM against malaria and tuberculosis.

7/01/2014 – Congratulations to Joel on his promotion to Associate Professor!

6/26/2014 – Congratulations to the group on the just accepted manuscript at the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling entitled "Are Bigger Datasets Better for Machine Learning? Fusing Single-Point and Dual-event Dose Response Data For Mycobacterium tuberculosis."

6/23/2014 – Congratulations to the group on the just accepted manuscript at Drug Discovery Today entitled "Minding the Gaps in Tuberculosis Research."

4/25/2014 – Congratulations to the group on new funding from NIH/NIAID! A multi-PI team at Rutgers University has been awarded a $26 million grant to discover and optimize a next generation of antibacterials (press release). The Freundlich lab is leading a project, a core, and a co-leading a second project.

4/23/2014 – Congratulations to Mi-Sun, Mike, and former group members Justin Roberts and Kurt Saoinz on their paper on the metabolomic consequences of DHFR inhibition being accepted in Chemistry and Biology!

4/03/2014 – Congratulations to former group member Rick Pottorf on his paper being accepted on in vivo Bayesian models in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling!

2/07/2014 – Congratulations to the group on new (R21) funding from NIH/NIAID!

2/07/2014 – Congratulations to the group on a second new grant (R21) from NIH/NIAID!