Center for Drug Design                          2nd Research Symposium

Michael J. Sofia, Ph.D. is currently Distinguished Professor at the Baruch Blumberg Institute and Adjunct Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Arbutus Biopharma, Inc for over 12 years until his retirement in 2024. He is internationally recognized for his work on the discovery and  development of drugs to treat and cure viral diseases including HCV and HBV. During his career he has introduced numerous drugs into clinical development and is responsible for the discovery and early development of sofosbuvir, which became the backbone of many HCV curative therapies including Sovaldi®, Harvoni®, Epclusa® and Vosevi®. Michael has published extensively in the area of drug discovery and development. He has held research and research management positions at Gilead Sciences, Pharmasset, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Transcell  Technologies and Eli Lilly and Company. He holds a BA in chemistry from Cornell University, a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. 

He has received numerous awards for his work on hepatitis C including the 2015 Economist Innovation Award, the 2015 ACS Heroes of Chemistry Award, 2016 IUPAC-Richter Prize, the 2016 Lasker-Debakey Award in Clinical Medical Research, the 2017 Gertrude Elion Award from the International Society for Antiviral Research, the 2018 IS3NA John  Montgomery Award and the 2020 Cameron Prize for Therapeutics from the University of Edinburgh. In 2017 he was inducted into the American Chemical Society Medicinal Chemistry Hall of Fame and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Regents' Professor and Distinguished University Professor at Georgia State University and Director of the Georgia State Center for Translational Antiviral Research, specializes in pathogenesis of respiratory RNA viruses and the development of next-generation antiviral therapeutics directed against respiratory viruses of pandemic concern. He has established the GSU high-throughput antiviral drug screening facility and identified novel drug candidates that are currently at different stages of development. Plemper is a Director of the Georgia State/Emory Antiviral Countermeasure Development Center (AC/DC), one of nine federally supported antiviral drug development (AViDD) centers in the nation that have been established to improve pandemic preparedness through next-generation antiviral therapeutics, and leads the SARS-CoV-2 antiviral drug discovery project of the AC/DC. Outside of the AC/DC, his laboratory receives NIH support to study the entry and replication machinery of influenza viruses, respiratory syncytial virus, and emerging and re-emerging paramyxo viruses such as human parainfluenza viruses, measles virus, and Nipah virus.