Principal investigator

György M. Keserű obtained his Ph.D. at Budapest, Hungary and joined Sanofi-Aventis heading a chemistry research lab. He moved to Gedeon Richter in 1999 as the Head of Computer-aided Drug Discovery. He earned D.Sc. from the Hungarian Academy of Science in 2003 and he was invited for a research professorship at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Since 2007 he was appointed as the Head of Discovery Chemistry at Gedeon Richter. He was involved in the discovery of 10 clinical candidates (41 patent applications) entered into clinical development in neurological and psychiatric indications. He contributed to the discovery of the antipsychotic Vraylar® (US)/ Reagila® (EU) that has been approved by the US FDA in 2015 and European authorities in 2017. The drug is on the US market from 2016 and available to European patients from 2018. He served as a director general of the Research Centre for Natural Sciences (RCNS) at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He played a significant role in the development of physicochemical profiling in drug discovery, the concept of compound quality and the improvement of optimization strategies in medicinal chemistry. His results has been acknowledged by the George A Olah Award and the Prous Institute Overton and Meyer Award of the European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry. In 2016 he has been elected as a Fellow (FRSC) of the Royal Society of Chemistry. From 2015 he is a full professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics and heading the Medicinal Chemistry Research Group at RCNS. His research interests include medicinal chemistry and drug design. He has published over 200 papers and more than 10 books and book chapters.