Bill Gates took a day out of his busy schedule on December 13, 2010 to spend it at Schrödinger's New York office. The morning began with Mr. Gates meeting with senior scientists from the company, followed by a meeting of the Scientific Advisory Board, where Mr. Gates received the latest progress and status reports on scientific development projects at Schrödinger. Afterwards, medicinal chemistry leaders from the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry joined Bill Gates, Rich Friesner, and Ramy Farid of Schrödinger along with SAB members Mark Murcko and Paul Anderson for a lively and far-ranging discussion of key issues currently facing the pharmaceutical industry.
Participants of the meeting were impressed to learn about Schrödinger's aggressive plans for and progress in developing next-generation simulation tools and shared ideas on how advances in computational chemistry tools can potentially transform the drug discovery process. Mr. Gates was very engaged throughout the meeting and strongly encouraged industry leaders to pool resources and data to collaboratively advance the state of the art for the industry. Schrödinger President Ramy Farid will be following up on a proposal from meeting participants with a series of invited visits to various pharmaceutical companies to produce an action plan for the collaboration.
Seated, from left to right: Mark Murcko, Vertex CTO and Schrödinger SAB member; Ramy Farid, Schrödinger President; Bill Gates; Rich Friesner, Schrödinger Founder and SAB Chairman; Boris Nikolic, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Senior Program Officer
Standing, from left to right: David Vaskevitch, Microsoft CTO (retired); Carl Decicco, BMS SVP Discovery Chemistry and Candidate Optimization; Dennis Holt, GSK Director of Chemistry; Paul Anderson, Schrödinger SAB member; Tony Wood, Pfizer SVP and Worldwide Head of Medicinal Chemistry; Muz Mansuri, Gilead SVP of Research; Scott Biller, Agios Pharma CSO; Hans-Joachim Böhm, Roche Basel Global Head of Medicinal Chemistry; Sandy Mills, Merck VP and Global Head of Chemistry; David E. Shaw, D. E. Shaw Research Chief Scientist