Abstract

Petr Kocis earned his Ph.D. in organic and medicinal chemistry at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czechoslovakia. He did his postdoctoral research with Prof. Jack Baldwin, the University of Oxford, England and worked with the Oxford Enzyme Group. During the last two decades he has been involved in drug discovery research in cancer, immunodeficiencies, asthma and drug lead discovery at Hoechst-Marion-Roussell, Zeneca Pharmaceuticals and AstraZeneca, lately as Associate Director, Global Enabling Science & Technologies, and Principle Scientist II. Dr. Kocis is one of the pioneers of combinatorial chemistry field, he helped to build Selectides combinatorial chemistry and technology in Tucson, Arizona, in the early 90s. In the mid 90s he co-build the US Chemical Technologies group at Zeneca Pharmaceuticals and co-developed a novel combinatorial chemistry that was industrialized within the International Lead Drug Discovery as a part of modern medicinal chemistry. He is a recipient of the R & D Directors Award for Creativity and Innovation by Zeneca, and a recipient of the Henry Christian Award for Excellence in Research by Merck. He is on the editorial board of several journals including Drugs of the Future and on the Scientific Advisory Board of Cambridge Healthtech Institute. Dr. Kocis is the author or coauthor of numerous articles, book chapters and patents. His research interest is multidimensional challenges of drug discovery, modern medicinal and combinatorial chemistry, visualization and data mining.