Gerhard F. Ecker is an Austrian

medicinal chemist Medicinal or pharmaceutical chemistry is a scientific discipline at the intersection of chemistry and pharmacy involved with designing and developing pharmaceutical drugs. Medicinal chemistry involves the identification, synthesis and developme ...

and expert in the fields of

Pharmacoinformatics Drug discovery and development requires the integration of multiple scientific and technological disciplines. These include chemistry, biology, pharmacology, pharmaceutical technology and extensive use of information technology. The latter is incre ...

at the

University of Vienna The University of Vienna (german: Universität Wien) is a public research university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world. With its long and rich h ...

, where he is the Professor for

and Head of th
Pharmacoinformatics Research Group
at the Department of

Medicinal Chemistry Medicinal or pharmaceutical chemistry is a scientific discipline at the intersection of chemistry and pharmacy involved with designing and developing pharmaceutical drugs. Medicinal chemistry involves the identification, synthesis and developme ...

. He also coordinates the research focus "Computational Life Sciences" of the Faculty of Life Sciences.

Career

Ecker received his doctorate in natural sciences from the University of Vienna in 1991, became appointed Associate Professor for Medicinal Chemistry in 1998 and Full Professor for Pharmacoinformatics in 2009. Ecker is Editor of Molecular Informatics and coordinates the EUROPIN PhD programme in Pharmacoinformatics. Currently he is also President of the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry.

Research

Ecker's research focuses on computational drug design which not only led to the identification of highly active

propafenone Propafenone, sold under the brand name Rythmol among others, is a class 1c anti-arrhythmic medication, which is used to treat illnesses associated with rapid heart beat such as atrial and ventricular arrhythmias. Mechanism of action Propafen ...

-type inhibitors of

P-glycoprotein P-glycoprotein 1 (permeability glycoprotein, abbreviated as P-gp or Pgp) also known as multidrug resistance protein 1 (MDR1) or ATP-binding cassette sub-family B member 1 (ABCB1) or cluster of differentiation 243 (CD243) is an important protein ...

, but also paved the way for development of new descriptors and

virtual screening Virtual screening (VS) is a computational technique used in drug discovery to search libraries of small molecules in order to identify those structures which are most likely to bind to a drug target, typically a protein receptor or enzyme. Virt ...

approaches for identification of new scaffolds active at P-gp. With the increasing knowledge on the importance of P-gp for

ADME ADME is an abbreviation in pharmacokinetics and pharmacology for " absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion", and describes the disposition of a pharmaceutical compound within an organism. The four criteria all influence the drug l ...

, his interest moved towards the prediction of P-gp substrate properties. Around 2010 he extended the studies also on other antitargets, such as the

hERG hERG (the human '' Ether-à-go-go''-Related Gene) is a gene () that codes for a protein known as Kv11.1, the alpha subunit of a potassium ion channel. This ion channel (sometimes simply denoted as 'hERG') is best known for its contribution to th ...

potassium channel, as well as on the serotonin transporter, the

GABA receptor The GABA receptors are a class of receptors that respond to the neurotransmitter gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), the chief inhibitory compound in the mature vertebrate central nervous system. There are two classes of GABA receptors: GABAA and ...

and the

insulin receptor The insulin receptor (IR) is a transmembrane receptor that is activated by insulin, IGF-I, IGF-II and belongs to the large class of receptor tyrosine kinase. Metabolically, the insulin receptor plays a key role in the regulation of glucose homeo ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ecker, Gerhard Austrian pharmacologists Academic staff of the University of Vienna Living people Computational chemists Year of birth missing (living people)