110 Misty Woods Circle, Apt T Chapel Hill, NC 27514

MAN (Melody) LUO

110 Misty Woods Circle, Apt T  Chapel Hill, NC 27514

919-360-6824 

HIGHLIGHTSTwo years of industry experience in GlaxoSmithKline (clinical and preclinical training).

Four years of graduate training at UNC in model-based drug discovery and development.

Excellent communication and proven leadership skills.

EDUCATIONUNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL,Chapel Hill, NC

ESHELMAN SCHOOL OF PHARMACY

Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences, expected in May 2011.

Certificate in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, expected in May 2011.

WUHAN UNIVERSITY, CHINAWuhan, China

BS in Biotechnology, Jun 2007.

SKILLSNONMEN, R/S-plus, WinBUGS, SAS, MATLAB, Python,Java,C++, SQL, UNIX

EXPERIENCEGLAXOSMITHKLINERTP, NC

Aug.10 ~ PresentCo-op at Clinical Pharmacology Modeling & Simulation Group.Working in multi-disciplinary development teams with physicians, statisticians, and clinical pharmacologists.

• Applied population PK and PK/PD modeling/simulation to aid in dose selection and covariate identification for Phase IIa study using WinNonlin and NONMEN.
• Conducted literature meta-analysis of a viral dynamic model on short-term vs. long-term change for a FTIH anti-viral agent.

May 10 ~ Jul. 10Intern at Clinical Pharmacology Modeling & Simulation Group. Collaborating with cross-functional matrix/project team members, including clinical virologists, computational chemists and computational biologists, to inform decisions at clinical development milestones.

• Achieved over 80% prediction accuracy when mapping genotypes with phenotypesof an anti-viral agent project, which will aid patient recruitment process for the phase IIb study.
• Accurately predicted all significant substitutions to resistant mutations by models and identified viral genetic evolutionary mutation patternsusing R packages.

Aug.09 ~ Oct. 09Co-op at Computationaland Structural Chemistry Group. Effective collaborating and building relationships between academic labs at UNC and industrial project teams in GSK.

• Validated the academic developed approach CoLiBRI,a structural-based virtual screening methodology, against GSK in-house docking/scoring data set.

May 09 ~ Jul. 09Summer intern at Computational and Structural Chemistry Group. Working closely with crystallographers and data management experts for database curation and SAR analysis.

• Identified and curated176 files out of over 4,000 GSK in-house protein structural files in PDB and XML formats, with automated workflow conducted in Python scripts.
• Evaluated the predictive power of Free-Wilson analysis for structure-activity relationships, with robust statistical summaries drawn from most of the data serious examined.

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILLChapel Hill, NC

Aug.08 ~ PresentResearch Assistant in Eshelman School of Pharmacy.

• Identified nanomolar potent 5-HT1A inhibitors using model-based drug discovery methods and virtual screening approach.
• Discoveredthe false positives for HTS assays data in PubChem using quantitative structure -activity relationship (QSAR) models, with results supported by experimental tests.
• Identified pharmacophore for RecA inhibitors, built QSAR models and conducted virtual screening for RecA inhibitors with novel scaffold.
• Validated and compared the predictive accuracy of QSAR models for multi-target profile predictions with several other popular algorithms.
• Evaluated the coformulation feasibility of INH and SMX-TMP for HIV patients with TB.
• AppliedFFSM algorithm to aid structural classificationof proteins bymining common 3D spatial motifs among proteins with similar sequences, and validated the convergent evolutionary relationships between two pairs of proteins with distinct sequence similarity.

Aug 07 ~ May 09Teaching Assistant in Eshelman School of Pharmacy.

Lecturing, grading and holding office hours for some Pharm. D. core courses.

WUHAN UNIVERSITYWuhan, China

Sep. 05 ~ Jun. 07Research Assistant in College of Life Sciences.

• Developed a novel assay to examine the onset of tumor or cancer by detecting telomerase activity based on Rolling Circle Amplification (RCA) technique.
• Corporately worked on the study to elucidate the catalytic mechanism of the “10-23” RNA-cleaving DNAzyme on various ionic conditions.

ZHONGNAN HOSPITAL OF WUHAN UNIVERSITYWuhan, China

Jun. 05 ~ Aug.06Clinical Assistant in Department of Hematology.

• Assisted the discovery that FANCF gene methylation is a rare event in hematological malignancies bycollecting blood samples from patients with AML and MDS, obtaining the genomic DNA and performing the HpaII restriction enzyme digestion.

PUBLICATIONS AND SYPOSIUMS

• Bi-feng Yuan, Man Luo, Zheng Tan. et al. "Two DNAzymes targeting the telomerase mRNA with large difference in Mg2+ concentration for maximal catalytic activity. Effect of flanking sequence on RNA cleavage by DNAzyme". Int. J. Biochem. Cell Biol. 2007; 39(6):1119-1129
• Man Luo, Alex Tropsha. et al. “Combinatorial QSAR analysis of RecA inhibitors and QSAR-based virtual screening”. The 239thAmerican Chemical Society National Meeting, San Francisco, CA, Mar. 2010.
• Man Luo, Alex Tropsha. et al.“The use of QSAR models to validate the HTS assay data in PubChem: Application to the serotonin receptor 5-HT1A Ligands”.The 239thAmerican Chemical Society National Meeting, San Francisco, CA, Mar. 2010.
• Man Luo, Alex Tropsha. et al.“Combinatorial QSAR analysis of 5-HT1A receptor binders and application of resulting models to virtual screening”The 239thAmerican Chemical Society National Meeting, San Francisco, CA, Mar. 2010.
• Fei Chen, Man Luo. et al. "FANCF Gene Methylation is a Rare Event in Hematological Malignancies". The 18th Annual Fanconi Anemia Research Fund Scientific Symposium, North Bethesda, MD, Oct. 2006.
• The 45th American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL, May 2009.
• The 235thAmerican Chemical Society (ACS) National Meeting, New Orleans, LA, Apr. 2008.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

• Secretary of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Sciences (AAPS) Pharmacogenomics Focus Group (2010 ~ 2011).
• Member of the Advisory Committee for Strategic Planning and Internationalization in Eshelman School of Pharmacy, UNC (2008 ~ 2011, Chapel Hill, NC).
• National Science Foundation travel grant for Cyberinfrastructure workshop (2010,Denver,CO).
• Host of Tri-school Karaoke Competition for Chinese Students and Scholars(2007,Raleigh,NC).

References available upon request