James Zapf, Ph.D.

Dr. James Zapf has 21 years of direct experience in developing small molecule therapeutics in the biopharmaceutical industry. His work has resulted in 8 patents and 6 clinical candidates.His area of specific expertise is the use of structure-based drug design and Structure Activity Relationships (SAR) to identify and optimize small molecules for clinical development. In addition to working directly on inflammatory disease he has expertise in drug discovery for diabetes, cardiovascular, and cancer. He has developed computational methods for virtual screening/hit identification, driving SAR studies, optimizing lead molecules, improving compound properties and predicting ADME profiles. At Helicon he importantly contributed to the filing of an IND for a small molecule enzyme inhibitor. At Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharmaceuticals Dr. Zapf led 2 nuclear receptor projects from target identification to IND-enabling studies for inflammatory diseases.
Dr. Zapf obtained a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of South Carolina and did postdoctoral studies at the Scripps Research Institute on protein structure function. He has 27 peer-reviewed publications.