Dr. GPCR Podcast

About Dr. Robert F. Bruns

Fred Bruns discovered the first positive allosteric modulator (PAM) of a GPCR in the late 1980s while working at Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis. The work was published in 1990. After 7 years at WL/PD and 26 years at Eli Lilly & Co., he retired at the end of 2014 and since then has been writing papers on his final major project at Lilly, a dopamine D1 PAM series that has advanced through Phase 2 clinical trials. Fred obtained an A.B. in Psychology from Washington University in St. Louis, followed by a Ph.D. in Neurosciences at the University of California, San Diego. His doctoral dissertation was the first large-scale study of structure-activity relationships for adenosine receptors. During a joint postdoc with John W Daly at NIH and Solomon Snyder at Johns Hopkins, he developed the first adenosine receptor binding assay. He then joined WL/PD, where his lab demonstrated the existence of two subtypes of the adenosine A2 receptor, A2a and A2b. In 1988, he joined Lilly as a receptor biologist in charge of a high-throughput screening lab. He taught himself chemoinformatics as a way to optimize compound selection for screening, and in 1997 switched to computational chemistry full-time. He supported the D1 PAM project in various roles from its inception in 2002 until selection of a clinical candidate in 2013. Dr. Bruns has over 80 publications and 11,000 citations, with an h-index of 47.

Dr. Robert F. Bruns on the web

• ResearchGate

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