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Ed is a co-founder of the not-for-profit Afya World Medicines, which merged with IDRI in 2008. Prior to that he spent 9 years at ICOS Corporation in the medicinal chemistry group working to discover drugs against cancer and inflammation. At IDRI he is heading efforts to discover new drugs to fight tuberculosis.

 

He received a BS from Stanford University in 1985 and a PhD in Organic Chemistry from the University of California, San Diego in 1993. At ICOS he initiated chemistry on the ICOS Chk1 kinase inhibitor program, and this eventually resulted in an anti-cancer compound that entered Phase I clinical trials in 2006. He also was instrumental in discovering pre-clinical candidates in two other kinase programs that were licensed to outside parties. One of these entered human testing in March 2008. He is an inventor on over 20 patents in 5 target areas and an author on numerous peer-reviewed articles. Ed is fluent in Spanish, and his extensive travels in Latin America have inspired him to work towards solutions to problems of global health and third world diseases.

 

Before joining ICOS in 1997, he worked as a scientist at Prolinx Inc., a Seattle-area biotech startup, where he was an inventor of a key molecule in the Linx® affinity chromatography system, later distributed by Invitrogen Corporation.