Celia A. Schiffer, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and
Molecular Pharmacology, University of Massachusetts Medical School. She conceptualized an
interdisciplinary approach to avoid drug resistance and co-founded the Institute for Drug
Resistance. Dr. Schiffer has a BA in physics from the University of Chicago, Ph.D. in
biophysics from University of California, San Francisco, with postdoctoral training at
the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland and Genentech, Inc. She has published 70 peer reviewed
journal articles, using a combination of experimental and computational biophysical
techniques to obtain key biological insights. Her laboratory primarily studies the
molecular basis for drug resistance in HIV and more recently Hepatitis C. In addition to
three NIH R01’s, she leads a renewed $8.6 million NIH program project grant: “Targeting
Ensembles of Drug Resistant HIV Proteases.” Through her research, she has developed a new
paradigm for avoiding drug resistance that likely translates to other diseases. This new
paradigm is the basis for the design of novel picomolar HIV-1 protease inhibitors that
are more potent in viral cultures of wild-type and resistant viruses than the leading
HIV-1 protease inhibitor Darunavir. These novel inhibitors strongly support the premise:
that by putting drug resistance first in development of drug design strategies,
inhibitors can be developed that are more robust against drug resistance.
Articles
Link
Methyl- and Normal-Cytosine Deamination by the Foreign DNA Restriction Enzyme APOBEC3A (with Michael A. Carpenter, Ming Li, Anurag Rathore, Lela Lackey, Emily R. Law, Allison M. Land, Brandon Leonard, Shivender M. D. Shandilya, Markus-Frederik Bohn, William L. Brown, and Reuben S. Harris), The Journal of biological chemistry (2012)
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The Molecular Basis of Drug Resistance against Hepatitis C Virus NS3/4A Protease Inhibitors (with Keith P. Romano, Akbar Ali, Cihan Aydin, Djade Soumana, Aysegul Ozen, Laura M. Deveau, Casey Silver, Hong Cao, Alicia Newton, Christos J. Petropoulos, and Wei Huang), PLoS pathogens (2012)
Contributions to Books
