Join us at East Texas Baptist University in Marshall the evening of April 23, 2020 for our next meeting.
Speaker: Dr. Yvette Fobian
Title: Driving Small Molecule Drug Discovery in Pfizer Through Synthesis
Yvette Fobian is Senior Director, Head of Synthesis for Inflammation & Immunology Medicinal Chemistry at Pfizer. She received her BS in chemistry from Southeast Missouri State University and obtained her PhD in organic chemistry from Washington University in St. Louis where she worked on the development of conformationally restricted peptide-mimetics with Professor Kevin D. Moeller. Following a post-doc in Monsanto's Corporate Research division developing new routes to glyphosate (the active ingredient in Round-up
), she joined the Searle/Monsanto Medicinal Chemistry Group in St. Louis, MO in 1997 and through a series of mergers and acquisitions joined Pfizer in 2003. Over the course of her tenure in St. Louis, Yvette worked in a variety of therapeutic areas including inflammation, oncology, cardiovascular, neuroscience and pain; contributing to the advancement of a number of clinical candidates. In 2010 Yvette assumed the role of director in Groton, CT for a new medicinal chemistry group supporting the inflammation and immunology portfolio. Her team has been instrumental in driving the discovery of potential new small molecule medicines for the Inflammation and Immunology portfolio through the design and development of synthetic innovations that drive medicinal chemistry strategies. Over the last decade, Yvette and her team have delivered numerous clinical candidates across a multitude of therapeutic indications and have helped create Pfizer’s JAK franchise of clinical assets. Yvette has held a number of global and local leadership roles within Pfizer medicinal chemistry contributing to the development and implementation of proprietary data mining tools, informatics infrastructure for synthesis, and initiatives with Drug Safety to improve safety attrition in early discovery programs and is an author or inventor on more than 50 scientific publications and patents. Yvette has lived coast to coast having been born in Alameda, CA, growing up in southeast Missouri, and now living in East Lyme, CT with her husband, Jim Fobian, a retired landscape architect. She has two grown children, Kayla and Nathan, who share the family passion of scuba diving and volleyball.
