Professor
Department of Pediatrics, School of Medicine
Adjunct Professor
Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences
Human Resources
Lydia Heidt (formerly Napa)
lnapa@health.ucsd.edu
858-822-7861
Reimbursements
Adrienne Gomez
aigomez@health.ucsd.edu
(858) 822-6856
Dr. Winzeler is an expert in drug development for microbial pathogens. Ongoing projects cover many areas within small molecule drug development and range from target discovery and validation, cheminformatics, chemistry, bioinformatics, assay development, high throughput screening and the genetics and genomics of drug resistance. Much of her work focuses on malaria parasites. She is the director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Malaria Drug Accelerator (MalDA,https://MalariaDA.org) a consortium of 18 international laboratories, pharmaceutical companies and research groups whose collective work focuses on identifying new targets and early chemical leads for the global malaria drug discovery pipeline.
Education: BA in Art/Natural Sciences Lewis and Clark College (1984); MA in Biochemistry and Biophysics, Oregon State (1990), PhD in Developmental Biology Stanford University (1996), Postdoctoral Research, Stanford University Biochemistry Department (1996-1999).
Awards and Honors: Elected to the National Academy of Medicine (2021); ASTMH Craig Lecture (2020); UCSD Health Science Women Leadership Award (2020); Rady Children’s Hospital Awards of Excellence in Basic Research (2020); United Arab Emirates Crown Prince Count Reaching the Last Mile Finalist (2019); William Trager Award on behalf of ASTMH and the American Committee of Molecular, Cellular and Immunoparasitology (2018); ASBMB Alice and C.C. Wang Award in Molecular Parasitology (2017); Medicines for Malaria Venture Project of the Year (2016); Fellow of the American Society for Microbiology (2016); Bailey Ashford Medal, American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (2014); Semi-finalist HHMI New Investigator Competition (2014); Howard T. Ricketts Symposium Lecture (2013); American Society for Microbiology Division AA Lecturer (2011); Semi-finalist, HHMI New Investigator Competition (2009); W.M. Keck Foundation, Distinguished Young Scholar in Medical Research Award (2004)
Leadership Experience: Director, Malaria Drug Accelerator (2012-present); Chair, Health Sciences Faculty Council (2019-2021); Director of Translational Research, Department of Pediatrics
- Drug discovery and development
- Target identification and validation
- Strategic partnerships with industry
- Meister, S. et al. (2011). Imaging of Plasmodium liver stages to drive next-generation antimalarial drug discovery. Science 334, 1372-1377.
- Hoepfner, D. et al. (2012). Selective and specific inhibition of the plasmodium falciparum lysyl-tRNA synthetase by the fungal secondary metabolite cladosporin. Cell Host Microbe 11, 654-663
- McNamara, C. W. et al. (2013). Targeting Plasmodium PI(4)K to eliminate malaria. Nature 504, 248-253
- Antonova-Koch, Y. et al. (2018). Open-source discovery of chemical leads for next-generation chemoprotective antimalarials. Science 362 (6419).aat9446.
- Cowell, A. N. et al. (2018). Mapping the malaria parasite druggable genome by using in vitro evolution and chemogenomics. Science 359, 191-199.
- Collaborative research projects targeting malaria (Novartis, GSK, Kainomyx, Calibr, GNF, TropIQ)