Dr. Joshua Pottel (born 1989)
Wikipedia 🌐 NONE
ASSOCIATIONS
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https://www.newspapers.com/image/420972858/?terms=%22josh%20pottel%22&match=1
father is Ronnie Pottel
https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-pottel/?originalSubdomain=ca
2020-01-29-linkedin-com-josh-pottel.pdf
2020-01-29-linkedin-com-josh-pottel-img-1.jpg
Experience
Molecular Forecaster Inc. is a leading scientific company that distributes the FORECASTER platform and offers research contract services. We are a team of specialized scientists with work experience in medicinal, synthetic and computational chemistry in both academic and industrial environments. We use our chemical intuition to solve problems and to develop our own programs with unique features.
Education
Shoichet Lab Group doing research in chemoinformatics
Honours in chemistry with a minor in computer science.
Show fewer education
Volunteer experience
Mentor
Company Name
DCAT RI-MUHC Pathfinders Mentorship Program
Dates volunteered
Feb 2019 – Present
Volunteer duration
3 yrs
Cause
Education
2 yrs 2 mos
The HBHL Postdoc Mentorship Program provides an opportunity for HBHL-funded postdoctoral fellows to explore career options by meeting successful professionals in academic and non-academic careers. It will run from November 2019 to July 2020.External Representative
Company Name
CERMM Advisory Committee
Dates volunteered
Dec 2019 – Present
Volunteer duration
2 yrs 2 mos
Cause
Science and Technology
https://twitter.com/JPottel/status/1268873775669526528?s=20&t=8boggSB4t3yDsRz1nDmfug
2020-06-05-twitter-com-jpottel-1268873775669526528,jpg
https://twitter.com/JPottel/status/1223351869411676160?s=20&t=8boggSB4t3yDsRz1nDmfug
So... Feb 02 is his birthday ...
2009 .. age 20, on July 08 2009 ...
so he was born on Feb 02 1989 ...
2020 (Jan 20) paper -
https://sci-hub.se/10.1021/acs.molpharmaceut.9b00658
Note - Still describes Joshua Pottel as "UCSF", not "CEO of Molecular Forecaster"
2020 (April 26) - Science Magazine : "New York clinical trial quietly tests heartburn remedy against coronavirus"
By Brendan Borrell / Apr. 26, 2020 , 12:00 PM / Source : [HP009H][GDrive] / See SARS-COV2 famotidine trials (2020)
The fast-growing list of possible treatments for the novel coronavirus includes an unlikely candidate: famotidine, the active compound in the over-the-counter heartburn drug Pepcid. On 7 April, the first COVID-19 patients at Northwell Health in the New York City area began to receive famotidine intravenously, at nine times the heartburn dose. Unlike other drugs the 23-hospital system is testing, including Regeneron’s sarilumab and Gilead Sciences’s remdesivir, Northwell kept the famotidine study under wraps to secure a research stockpile before other hospitals, or even the federal government, started to buy it. “If we talked about this to the wrong people or too soon, the drug supply would be gone,” says Kevin Tracey, a former neurosurgeon in charge of the hospital system’s research.
As of Saturday, 187 COVID-19 patients in critical status, including many on ventilators, have been enrolled in the trial, which aims for a total of 1174 people. Reports from China and molecular modeling results suggest the drug, which seems to bind to a key enzyme in severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), could make a difference. But the hype surrounding hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine—the unproven antimalarial drugs touted by President Donald Trump and some physicians and scientists—has made Tracey wary of sparking premature enthusiasm. He is tight-lipped about famotidine’s prospects, at least until interim results from the first 391 patients are in. “If it does work, we’ll know in a few weeks,” he says.
A globe-trotting infectious disease doctor named [Dr. Michael Vincent Callahan (born 1962)] was the first to call attention to the drug in the United States. Callahan, who is based at Massachusetts General Hospital and has extensive connections in the biodefense world, has spent time in disease hot zones around the world, including the 2003 outbreak of another coronavirus disease, SARS, in Hong Kong. In mid-January, he was in Nanjing, China, working on an avian flu project. As the COVID-19 epidemic began to explode in Wuhan, he followed his Chinese colleagues to the increasingly desperate city.
The virus was killing as many as one out of five patients older than 80. Patients of all ages with hypertension and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease were faring poorly. Callahan and his Chinese colleagues got curious about why many of the survivors tended to be poor. “Why are these elderly peasants not dying?” he asks.
In reviewing 6212 COVID-19 patient records, the doctors noticed that many survivors had been suffering from chronic heartburn and were on famotidine rather than more-expensive omeprazole (Prilosec), the medicine of choice both in the United States and among wealthier Chinese. Hospitalized COVID-19 patients on famotidine appeared to be dying at a rate of about 14% compared with 27% for those not on the drug, although the analysis was crude and the result was not statistically significant.
But that was enough for Callahan to pursue the issue back home. After returning from Wuhan [(when did he return?)], he briefed [Robert Peter Kadlec (born 1957)], assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services, then checked in with [Dr. Robert Wallace Malone (born 1959)], chief medical officer of Florida-based Alchem Laboratories, a contract manufacturing organization. Malone is part of a classified project called [DOMANE ( "Discovery of Medical Countermeasures Against Novel Entities" , created by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency in Dec of 2019 )] that uses computer simulations, artificial intelligence, and other methods to rapidly identify U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved drugs and other safe compounds that can be repurposed against threats such as new viruses.
[Dr. Robert Wallace Malone (born 1959)] had his eyes on a viral enzyme called the papainlike protease, which helps the pathogen replicate. To see whether famotidine binds to the protein, he would ordinarily need the enzyme’s 3D structure, but that would not be available for months. So Malone recruited computational chemist [Dr. Joshua Pottel (born 1989)], president of Montreal-based Molecular Forecaster, to predict it from two crystal structures of the protease from the 2003 SARS coronavirus, combined with the new coronavirus’ RNA sequence.
It was hardly plug-and-play. Among other things, they compared the gene sequences of the new and old proteases to rule out crucial differences in structure. [Dr. Joshua Pottel (born 1989)] then tested how 2600 different compounds interact with the new protease. The modeling yielded several dozen promising hits that pharmaceutical chemists and other experts narrowed to three. Famotidine was one. (The compound has not popped up in in vitro screens of existing drug libraries for antiviral activity, however.)
“If it does work, we’ll know in a few weeks,” says Northwell Health’s Kevin Tracey, who leads the famotidine study,
With both the tantalizing Chinese data and the modeling pointing toward famotidine, a low-cost, generally safe drug, Callahan contacted Tracey about running a double-blind randomized study. COVID-19 patients with decreased kidney function would be excluded because high doses of famotidine can cause heart problems in them.
After getting FDA approval, Northwell used its own funds to launch the effort. Just getting half of the needed famotidine in sterile vials took weeks, because the injectable version is not widely used. On 14 April, the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), which operates under Kadlec, gave Alchem a $20.7 million contract for the trial, most of which paid Northwell’s costs.
The study’s draft protocol was aimed only at evaluating famotidine’s efficacy, but Trump’s “game-changer” antimalarial drug was rapidly becoming the standard of care for hospitalized COVID-19 patients. That meant investigators would only be able to recruit enough subjects for a trial that tested a combination of famotidine and hydroxychloroquine. Those patients would be compared with a hydroxychloroquine-only arm and a historic control arm made up of hundreds of patients treated earlier in the outbreak. “Is it good science? No,” Tracey says. “It’s the real world.”
Anecdotal evidence has encouraged the Northwell researchers. After speaking to Tracey, David Tuveson, director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Cancer Center, recommended famotidine to his 44-year-old sister, an engineer with New York City hospitals. She had tested positive for COVID-19 and developed a fever. Her lips became dark blue from hypoxia. She took her first megadose of oral famotidine on 28 March. The next morning, her fever broke and her oxygen saturation returned to a normal range. Five sick co-workers, including three with confirmed COVID-19, also showed dramatic improvements after taking over-the-counter versions of the drug, according a spreadsheet of case histories Tuveson shared with Science. Many COVID-19 patients recover with simple symptom-relieving medications, but Tuveson credits the heartburn drug. “I would say that was a penicillin effect,” he says.
After an email chain about Tuveson’s experience spread widely among doctors, Timothy Wang, head of gastroenterology at Columbia University Medical Center, saw more hints of famotidine’s promise in his own retrospective review of records from 1620 hospitalized COVID-19 patients. Last week, he shared the results with Tracey and Callahan, and he added them as a co-authors on a paper now under review at the Annals of Internal Medicine. All three researchers emphasize, though, that the real test is the trial now underway. “We still don’t know if it will work or not,” Tracey says.
Callahan has kept busy since his return from China. Kadlec deployed him on medical evacuation missions of Americans on two heavily infected cruise ships. Now back to doing patient rounds in Boston, he says the famotidine lead underscores the importance of science diplomacy in the face of an infectious disease that knows no borders. When it comes to experience with COVID-19, he says, “No amount of smart people at the [National Institutes of Health] or Harvard or Stanford can outclass an average doctor in Wuhan.”
July 2019 company website - https://web.archive.org/web/20190709153849/https://www.molecularforecaster.com/about
https://en.everybodywiki.com/Molecular_Forecaster#cite_note-17
2022-02-03-everybodywiki-com-molecular-forecaster.pdf
2022-02-03-everybodywiki-com-molecular-forecaster-img-01.jpg
2022-02-03-everybodywiki-com-molecular-forecaster-img-02.jpg
Molecular Forecaster
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Private
🆔
Founded 📆
2010
Founders 👔
Nicolas Moitessier,
Eric Therrien
Headquarters 🏙️
Montréal, Québec
Area served 🗺️
Worldwide
Key people
Josh Pottel (President & CEO)
Products 📟
Structure-based drug design
Metabolism prediction
Combinatorial Chemistry
Asymmetric Catalysis
Members
Number of employees
2-10
🌐 Website
📇 Address
📞 telephone
Molecular Forecaster Inc. is a Canadian software company developing tools for different elements of the drug discovery pipeline. More specifically, they use computational chemistry, biophysics, and artificial intelligence in their medicinal chemistry and organic chemistry software. They are headquartered at the NeoMED Institute in the Technoparc in Montréal, Québec as of October 2018.[1]
Molecular Forecaster was founded in 2010 as part of a commercialization package from McGill University to Nicolas Moitessier and colleague Eric Therrien. The company was further supported by ViroChem (before it was acquired by Vertex Pharmaceuticals) and by Aligo Innovation.[2] The incorporation followed the first Fessenden award for innovation to Prof. Moitessier for the development of the Forecaster suite.[3] Although there was interest in the McGill community,[4][5] the company remained somewhat virtual until October 2018 when it opened an office at the NeoMED institute (since merged with CDRD to form adMare Bioinnovations).[6]. Molecular Forecaster has the exclusive right to distribute the software developed by Prof. Moitessier at McGill.
Molecular Forecaster specializes in algorithm design[7] and supports its back-end code with a workflow-like graphical user interface and Jmol. Standard routines are provided by default, whereas users can create their own custom workflows using the interface. Alternatively, the software execution is possible from the command-line. The main applications are:
Fitted for structure-based drug design (docking)[8][9][10][11]
Impacts for site of metabolism prediction and inhibition/induction of cytochrome P450s[12][13]
React2D for combinatorial chemistry[14]
Ace for asymmetric catalysis simulation[15]
These programs are supported by integrated setup/preparation tools to perform routine actions like converting molecules from 2D to 3D, protonating amino acids, and rebuilding broken side-chain residues.[16]
The software is available for Linux, MacOSX, and Windows.
Molecular Forecaster provides contract research services to small biotechnology and larger pharmaceutical companies. They report having previously worked with IRCM on their website.
In 2019, Molecular Forecaster announced a partnership with ChemSpace to accelerate drug discovery.[17]
Molecular Forecaster was nominated in 2019 for an Alpha award from the Saint Laurent Chamber of Commerce for excellence in research and development.[18]
Other institutions developing software for computational chemistry:
Accelrys
CambridgeSoft
ChemAxon
Chemical Computing Group
Cresset Biomolecular Discovery
Dotmatics
OpenEye Scientific Software
Optibrium
Schrödinger
↑ "Newsletter – November 2018". Technoparc Montréal. November 15, 2018. Retrieved 5 June 2019.
↑ "ACHIEVEMENTS". Aligo Innovation. Retrieved 5 June 2019.
↑ "SeRIOus about Innovation" (PDF). McGill. Retrieved 5 June 2019.
↑ Brennan, Jake; Buch, Danielle; Harris, Thierry; Mullins, Andrew; Forsythe, Matt (September 4, 2009). "From Eureka to Your World". McGill Reporter. Retrieved 5 June 2019.
↑ Yates, Dana (March 26, 2013). "Turning research into INNOV4TION". McGill Reporter. Retrieved 5 June 2019.
↑ "CDRD & NEOMED Institute Announce Merger to Create a New Pan-Canadian Enterprise 'adMare BioInnovations'". T-Net. June 3, 2019. Retrieved 5 June 2019.
↑ Moitessier, Nicolas; Pottel, Joshua; Therrien, Eric; Englebienne, Pablo; Liu, Zhaomin; Tomberg, Anna; Corbeil, Christopher R. (16 August 2016). "Medicinal Chemistry Projects Requiring Imaginative Structure-Based Drug Design Methods". Accounts of Chemical Research. 49 (9): 1646–1657. doi:10.1021/acs.accounts.6b00185. PMID 27529781.
↑ Pottel, Joshua; Therrien, Eric; Gleason, James L.; Moitessier, Nicolas (27 January 2014). "Docking Ligands into Flexible and Solvated Macromolecules. 6. Development and Application to the Docking of HDACs and other Zinc Metalloenzymes Inhibitors". Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. 54 (1): 254–265. doi:10.1021/ci400550m. ISSN 1549-9596. PMID 24364808.
↑ Therrien, Eric; Weill, Nathanael; Tomberg, Anna; Corbeil, Christopher R.; Lee, Devin; Moitessier, Nicolas (24 November 2014). "Docking Ligands into Flexible and Solvated Macromolecules. 7. Impact of Protein Flexibility and Water Molecules on Docking-Based Virtual Screening Accuracy". Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. 54 (11): 3198–3210. doi:10.1021/ci500299h. ISSN 1549-9596. PMID 25280064.
↑ De Cesco, Stephane; Kurian, Jerry; Dufresne, Caroline; Mittermaier, Anthony K.; Moitessier, Nicolas (29 September 2017). "Covalent inhibitors design and discovery". European Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. 138: 96–114. doi:10.1016/j.ejmech.2017.06.019. ISSN 0223-5234. PMID 28651155.
↑ Luo, Jiaying; Wei, Wanlei; Waldispühl, Jérôme; Moitessier, Nicolas (15 April 2019). "Challenges and current status of computational methods for docking small molecules to nucleic acids". European Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. 168: 414–425. doi:10.1016/j.ejmech.2019.02.046. ISSN 0223-5234. PMID 30831409.
↑ Campagna-Slater, Valérie; Pottel, Joshua; Therrien, Eric; Cantin, Louis-David; Moitessier, Nicolas (24 September 2012). "Development of a Computational Tool to Rival Experts in the Prediction of Sites of Metabolism of Xenobiotics by P450s". Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. 52 (9): 2471–2483. doi:10.1021/ci3003073. ISSN 1549-9596. PMID 22916680.
↑ Tomberg, Anna; Pottel, Joshua; Liu, Zhaomin; Labute, Paul; Moitessier, Nicolas (2015). "Understanding P450-mediated Bio-transformations into Epoxide and Phenolic Metabolites". Angewandte Chemie International Edition. 54 (46): 13743–13747. doi:10.1002/anie.201506131. ISSN 1521-3773. PMID 26418278.
↑ Pottel, Joshua; Moitessier, Nicolas (27 March 2017). "Customizable Generation of Synthetically Accessible, Local Chemical Subspaces". Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. 57 (3): 454–467. doi:10.1021/acs.jcim.6b00648. ISSN 1549-9596. PMID 28234470.
↑ Weill, Nathanael; Corbeil, Christopher R.; Schutter, Joris W. De; Moitessier, Nicolas (2011). "Toward a computational tool predicting the stereochemical outcome of asymmetric reactions: Development of the molecular mechanics-based program ACE and application to asymmetric epoxidation reactions". Journal of Computational Chemistry. 32 (13): 2878–2889. doi:10.1002/jcc.21869. ISSN 1096-987X. PMID 21735450.
↑ Therrien, Eric; Englebienne, Pablo; Arrowsmith, Andrew G.; Mendoza-Sanchez, Rodrigo; Corbeil, Christopher R.; Weill, Nathanael; Campagna-Slater, Valérie; Moitessier, Nicolas (23 January 2012). "Integrating Medicinal Chemistry, Organic/Combinatorial Chemistry, and Computational Chemistry for the Discovery of Selective Estrogen Receptor Modulators with Forecaster, a Novel Platform for Drug Discovery". Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. 52 (1): 210–224. doi:10.1021/ci2004779. ISSN 1549-9596. PMID 22133077.
↑ "Chemspace and Molecular Forecaster Announce Partnership". chem-space.com. April 23, 2019. Retrieved 5 June 2019.
↑ "FINALISTES ALPHA 2019 FINALISTS" (PDF). Gala Alpha 2019. Retrieved 5 June 2019.
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