Rathnam Chaguturu
Rathnam Chaguturu, Ph.D., is senior director of exploratory research and deputy site head in SRI’s Center for Advanced Drug Research (CADRE). In this role, Chaguturu partners with SRI’s drug discovery and development teams to expand collaborative research relationships with academia, disease foundations, nonprofits, and government agencies.
Chaguturu has more than 30 years of experience in executing projects encompassing the full drug discovery cycle, including target validation, high-throughput screening (HTS), automation, probe/hit/lead identification and optimization, and clinical candidate selection. He has designed and developed HTS platforms for a number of therapeutically relevant targets, supported structure-based design strategies, and managed probe to hit-to-lead development-related projects.
Prior to joining SRI, Chaguturu was director of the University of Kansas High-Throughput Screening Laboratory. There, he played a key role in securing government, commercial, and foundation funding to establish new research programs. He also helped build a drug discovery pipeline of novel therapeutic targets of interest in both common and neglected diseases.
Prior to his work in Kansas, Chaguturu was director of drug discovery at Sierra Sciences, focusing on anti-aging research. He also led discovery research efforts at FMC Corporation for more than 20 years, where he focused on ion channel, receptor, enzyme, and cell-based targets. He was instrumental in designing the industry-first Zymark robotic screening platform for lead discovery. Earlier in his career, Chaguturu was on the biochemistry faculty at Rutgers University.
As a project leader at Dow Chemical Company, Chaguturu established the early principles of chemical library screening for lead discovery and developed tools for mining in-house chemistry archives.
Chaguturu has authored more than 50 research publications and holds 11 U.S. patents. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Combinatorial Chemistry and High Throughput Screening. Chaguturu is also one of the founding members of the Society for Biomolecular Sciences and the founding president of the International Chemical Biology Society. He received his Ph.D. in plant biochemistry from Sri Venkateswara University in Tirupati, India.
