Brian Shoichet

Brian Shoichet is a Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and a core member of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute (QBI). He holds joint appointments in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology and is affiliated with multiple graduate programs, including Biological and Medical Informatics, Biophysics, Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Pharmacogenomics. His research focuses on computational and experimental methods for drug discovery, particularly structure-based ligand design, GPCR targeting, and understanding the physical chemistry of drug behavior. Shoichet's work bridges molecular components and biological systems, employing modeling and collaboration between theory and experiment.

Shoichet earned his BSc in Chemistry and BSci in History from MIT (1985) and a PhD in Molecular Docking from UCSF (1991). His lab investigates protein structures to predict therapeutic leads, develops computational methods for ligand discovery, and explores the pharmacological relationships between drug targets based on ligand similarity rather than sequence/structure. Notable contributions include discoveries related to colloidal drug aggregates, SARS-CoV-2 inhibitors, and non-opioid analgesics.

His research interests span molecular recognition, computational chemical biology, and the integration of drug discovery with whole-organism biology. Recent projects include antiviral therapies for SARS-CoV-2, structure-based discovery of CFTR modulators, and elucidating tau protein interactions in Alzheimer’s disease. Shoichet has also addressed challenges like drug excipient effects and colloidal aggregation artifacts in screening.

• Key Awards: Society for Biomolecular Sciences Accomplishment Award (2011), Topliss Lectureship (2011), NSF Career Award (1998–2003), and others.
• Labs/Teams: Shoichet Lab (focusing on computational and experimental drug discovery), collaborations with QBI and UCSF’s Quantitative Sciences.