Society of Heterocyclic Chemistry honors Dale Boger with E.C. Taylor Senior Award
August 12, 2019
LA JOLLA, CA – Dale Boger, PhD, the Richard and Alice Cramer Professor of Chemistry at Scripps Research, has been awarded the E.C. Taylor Senior Award by the International Society of Heterocyclic Chemistry. He will receive his award at the Society’s 27th Congress in Kyoto, Japan, and deliver an award lecture there on Sept. 5.
“It’s a great honor to receive this award,” says Boger. “E. C. Taylor is a giant among chemists, a hero of mine, and it is a special honor to receive a recognition that honors him and his work. Many outstanding chemists before me have been recognized for their work with this award and I am thrilled to be among them.”
Heterocyclic chemistry is a branch of organic chemistry involving heterocycles, or compounds arranged in rings of both carbon and non-carbon atoms. Essentially all drugs on the market or under development are heterocyclic compounds.
Boger’s research focuses on synthetic organic and bioorganic chemistry. Discoveries in his lab have led to an experimental cancer vaccine that boosts the immune system’s ability to fight cancers, demonstrating a significant survival rate in mice with melanoma. Other work resulted in a structurally modified form of vancomycin, a powerful antibiotic, that makes the antibiotic 25,000 times more potent and much more durable against rising resistance.
In 2018, Boger received a Merit Award in excess of $2 million from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Drug Abuse to support his studies of how the body handles pain, with the intention of developing effective pain therapies that don’t have the serious side effects and addiction potential of opioid drugs.
Along with Scripps Research Professor Ben Cravatt, PhD, Boger founded a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, Abide Therapeutics, that uses a unique chemo-proteomic platform to identify new classes of drugs for a range of clinical disorders. Abide was acquired by Danish pharmaceutical firm H. Lundbeck A/S in May.
Boger earned his doctoral degree in chemistry from Harvard University. At Scripps Research, he is a member of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology, served as Chairman of the Department of Chemistry from 2012-2018 and serves on the faculty of the institute’s nationally ranked graduate program. Among his many other honors, Boger is a Fellow of the American Chemical Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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