The 2005 Makineni Lectureship

Robin E. Offord

The American Peptide Society will present the Rao Makineni Lectureship to Robin E. Offord for his 2004 PNAS paper entitled "Medicinal Chemistry Applied to a Synthetic Protein: Development of Highly Potent HIV Entry Inhibitors" at the 19th American Peptide Symposium, which will be held in San Diego, CA on June 18 - 23, 2005.

Prof. Robin Offord began in nuclear physics but soon changed to biology. He first worked at the Medical Research Council Laboratory, Cambridge, U.K. (1962-1966), in the group Frederick Sanger where he obtained his Doctorate and collaborated with, among others, César Milstein and Aaron Klug. He taught and researched at Oxford from 1966 - 1980 (University Lecturer in Molecular Biophysics, Tutor, Christ Church), when he left to become Director of the Département de Biochimie Médicale at Geneva. He was also President of Basic Medicine in Geneva from 1994 to 2000. Prof. Martin Rodbell (Nobel Prize 1994) was a visiting member of his group for two years in the early 1980s. In 2004 he became the founding Director of a new Department in the Medical Faculty, the Department of Structural Biology and Bioinformatics.

He was one of the pioneers of the technique of protein semisynthesis. He was responsible for the first of the so-called anti-HIV "fusion inhibitors" and building on this he and his colleagues have designed and made a series of semisynthetic and synthetic proteins which are among the most powerful anti-HIV substances currently known. One of them is the first to give full protection against infection in macaques. His Geneva research group receives support from the United States National Institutes of Health for this work as an overseas applicant, as well as support from the Swiss Government.

He has been adviser to governments in several countries, and to international organizations. He is currently adviser to the Netherlands Government on Proteomics, to the UN International Trade Centre, and a member of the Geneva government's Council for Regional Economic Development. He has been a Journal Managing Editor, member of many Editorial Boards and has consulted for many major pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms. He has been a co-founder of a number of start-ups. He was a co-founder of the Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics and is Chairman of the Advisory Board of Eclosion, Geneva's new life-sciences incubator. He shared the "Man of the Year 2002" award of the Swiss financial newspaper 'L'agefi'. He is Secretary of the American Peptide Society.

He has written, co-authored, or edited 6 books and is the author or co-author of 180 published scientific papers, mainly in various fields of protein science. He is co-inventor on several granted Patents.

*This lectureship is endowed by PolyPeptide Laboratories, Inc., and Murray and Zelda Goodman.