Manton R. Frierson, Ph.D.

Vice President, ChemInformatics & Computational Chem.

Dr. Manton R. Frierson has been developing the cheminformatics infrastructure for Pharmaron for the last three years. Before that, he was Director of Computational Chemistry and Cheminformatics at Advanced Syntech, where he worked closely with Dr. Lou's multidisciplinary research team in combinatorial chemistry, evaluating methods for exploring chemical space and diversity as well as developing methods for making "cherry-picking" from within libraries more practical. Dr. Frierson has over twenty years professional experience in molecular modeling and cheminformatics geared towards establishing structure-activity relationships. This includes over ten years in the pharmaceutical industry involved in drug discovery. He, along with his colleagues at Pharmaron, Beijing, has developed (and is constantly extending) the Chemical Exchange, Data Access and Recall system (CEDAR™) to facilitate handling of chemical information exchange internally and externally between Pharmaron and it's customers. The system includes the Enotes™ electronic laboratory notebook.

His public scientific contributions include twenty three publications, two patents and eight presentations at national and international conferences. He has completed projects in and has continued interests in such diverse areas as: COX-2 inhibitors and 5-α reductase inhibitors, peroxisome proliferator activated receptor (PPAR-γ) , G-coupled protein receptors (GPCR), and protein kinases (PK) as well as toxicology (mutagenicity and carcinogenicity, in particular).

Dr. Frierson received his B.S. in Chemistry from Clemson University, (Clemson, SC), an M.S. in Organic Chemistry from Indiana University (Bloomington, IN) and his Ph.D. from University of Georgia (Athens, GA) under the guidance of Prof. Norman L. Allinger (a principal figure in the development of molecular mechanics which is at the heart of most modern rational drug design). He then did a postdoctoral with Prof. Gilles Klopman of Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, OH) Prof. Klopman is known as the developer of MultiCASE, an artificial intelligence program particularly applied to the difficult field of SAR toxicology.