Tier I Canada Research Chair in Neuroscience
2007 Recipient, Max Forman Research Award
Dr. Donald Weaver uses computers to custom-design Alzheimer and epilepsy “cures”
Dr. Don Weaver is on a mission to develop drugs that will cut off neurological diseases –like Alzheimer and epilepsy – at their roots. “I want to develop drugs that block the underlying processes that lead to these diseases,” says Dr. Weaver, a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Neuroscience at Dalhousie. “I’m aiming to cure, not just alleviate symptoms or slow down progression.”
A neurologist with a PhD in computational organic chemistry, Dr. Weaver is using a network of sophisticated computers to model disease-causing proteins and their receptors. “If you can reveal the detailed shapes of receptor sites on these proteins, you can design a drug molecule to fit,” he explains. “The disease proteins are constantly shifting shape and moving around, so you need to make a dynamic drug that fits the receptor like a hand in a glove.”
Computer-aided drug design cuts decades off the arduous drug development process. Dr. Weaver and his colleagues have already developed hundreds of targeted compounds. One agent that Dr. Weaver co-invented is in Phase III human clinical trials in North America and Europe. Another anti-Alzheimer drug developed in his laboratory is in preclinical development in the United States. At the same time, he is pioneering a new class of anti-epilepsy drug that is also now in preclinical development. On a different front, he and his Dalhousie colleagues are developing a new class of antibiotics to tackle the problem of antibiotic resistance.
Co-founder of three drug companies, Dr. Weaver has received multi-million-dollar funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Atlantic Innovation Fund and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. In 2007, he received the prestigious Max Forman Research Award, presented annually by the Dalhousie Medical Research Foundation, and one of two coveted $1 million Centennial Awards granted by Maryland-based Alzheimer’s Disease Research (ADR).
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