International Society for antiviral research

Kathie Seley-Radtke is a Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), UMBC's 2015-2018 Presidential Research Professor, and the University of Maryland System-wide Regents Professor for Research. In 2016 she was named Maryland Chemist of the Year by the American Chemical Society. Her research involves using a medicinal chemistry approach to nucleoside/tide and heterocyclic drug discovery and development. Current projects include targeting Ebola, MERS-CoV, Dengue, Zika and Yellow Fever viruses, among other emerging and reemerging infectious diseases using her nucleos(t)ide “fleximers”. Kathie has given over 120 invited talks worldwide in 26 countries, published 90+ scientific articles and book chapters, and has organized a number of international conferences focused on medicinal chemistry, antiviral research and drug design. Kathie is also the Co-Chair of the 2021 Gordon Research Conference on Nucleosides, Nucleotides & Oligonucleotides. 

Some of her other major service contributions include her continuing role as one of the U.S. National Academies of Science's Jefferson Science Fellows with the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, Russia. For the past 18 years, Kathie has served on numerous NIH and other federal funding agency review panels, including as Chair/Alternate Chair for study sections such as the NIH “AIDS Discovery & Development of Therapeutics” panel. She is currently the Co-Chair of the NIH “Exploration of Antimicrobial Resistant Microbes and Therapeutics” panel. Kathie also serves as an Associate Editor for Antiviral Chemistry & Chemotherapy, Current Protocols in Chemical Biology, and for Molecules – Chemical Biology section. Kathie is a Past President and Secretary of ISAR’s complementary society, the International Society of Nucleosides, Nucleotides and Nucleic Acids (IS3NA). Kathie has also served two consecutive terms on the ISAR Board of Directors and as Chair of the ISAR Poster Awards for six years. She continues to serve as a member of that committee, as well as the Women in Science Committee. Most notably, Kathie has been heavily involved in mentoring junior colleagues, and as part of this, she initiated the Chu Awards for Early Career Women fellowship program for both ISAR and IS3NA, and she continues to Chair that important committee for both Societies. 

María-Jesús Pérez-Pérez received her PhD degree in Pharmacy at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain) in 1991, working on nucleoside analogues against HIV and supervised by Prof. María-José Camarasa. From 1992 to 1995 she joined the laboratory for Medicinal Chemistry at Rega Institute for Medical Research from KULeuven (Belgium) as a postdoctoral fellow under the supervision of Prof Piet Herdewijn, dealing with phosphonate derivatives of cyclohexenyl nucleosides. In 1995 she got a permanent position at the Medicinal Chemistry Institute, belonging to the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid (Spain), being promoted to Scientific Researcher in 2005 and to Research Professor in 2011. She has also been Head of Department (2005-2011) and Director of the Institute (2011-2015). 

Her research is mostly devoted to antiviral and antitumor chemotherapy from a medicinal chemistry perspective, participating in numerous projects funded by Autonomic, National or European institutions. She has addressed the design and synthesis of selective inhibitors against therapeutically-relevant nucleoside processing enzymes. In the antitumor chemotherapy field, she has been working in antiangiogenic agents inhibiting thymidine phosphorylase and in vascular disrupting agents targeting the colchicine binding site in tubulin. In the antiviral field, she has performed her research for a long time on different chemical entities acting at particular stages of HIV replication, and on purine derivatives against enterovirus. Her currently active areas of research involve antivirals against the replication of alpha and flavivirus. Her research is performed in close collaboration with international partners, as can be deduced from the coauthorship of her publications. 

She is author of more than 120 scientific peer-reviewed articles, invited reviews and book chapters, coauthor of 8 patent applications and has supervised 9 PhD thesis. She is member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the European Journal of Medicinal Chemistry and of Pharmaceutics. She is also coordinator of the Spanish network for antivirals against arboviral diseases (Rearbovir). She has participated several times at the International Conference for Antiviral Research since the first one she attended in Santa Fe (New Mexico, 1995) to the latest one in Baltimore (Maryland, 2019), where she was invited as a keynote speaker on antivirals against chikungunya virus.

Subhash Vasudevan was born in Singapore (1959).  He obtained his BSC (Honors) in Chemistry (La Trobe University, Australia; 1985) and PhD in Biochemistry from The Australian National University (ANU) in 1989 followed by post-doctoral training at the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysics in Germany and Research School of Chemistry at ANU.   He established his first independent research laboratory at James Cook University (Australia) when he was appointed as a lecturer in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (1993) and rose through the ranks to become a Reader (~Assoc. Professor).  It was during this period that he started working on dengue, focusing mainly on the viral NS3 and NS5 proteins. In 2003 he moved to Singapore as the inaugural Head of the Dengue Research Unit at the newly established Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases and led an intensive international effort to find directly acting antivirals against dengue virus serotypes.  In 2008 he was recruited to the Signature Research Program in Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School where he currently pursues his research interests in dengue and Zika virus pathogenesis and antiviral drug discovery. He was appointed as an Editor of Antiviral Research in 2009 and is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Virology  (2017-2021).  Recently, Subhash has started to become involved with ISAR to try and increase the membership from Asia.