Michael J. Sofia

Michael J. Sofia (* 1958 ) is an American chemist specializing in drug development.

Sofia graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor's degree in chemistry and received her PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . He was a post-doctoral student at Columbia University . He then worked for various pharmaceutical companies, including Eli Lilly and ER Squibb. He was Vice President, Research at Intercardia Research Labs (formerly Transcell Technologies) and Group Director at Bristol-Myers-Squibb. From 2005 to 2012 he was Senior Vice President of Chemistry at Pharmasset, which was acquired by Gilead in 2012, after which he was a consultant. In 2012 he was one of the founders and president of OnCore Biopharma (Arbutus Biopharma after merging in 2015), which develops hepatitis therapies . He's the Chief Scientific Officer there . He is also a professor at the Institute for Hepatitis and Viral Research at the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Institute. Since 2013 he has been Adjunct Professor at the School of Medicine at Drexel University .

In 2016, he and Ralf FW Bartenschlager and Charles M. Rice received the Lasker ~ DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for research on the hepatitis C virus . Bartenschlager and Rice succeeded in multiplying the hepatitis C virus in cell cultures in the laboratory (replicon system), which Sofia used in drug development ( Sofosbuvir , developed by Pharmasset).

He serves on the editorial boards of Infectious Diorders: Drug Targets, Expert Opinion on Drug Discovery, and Organic and Medicinal Chemistry Letters .

Sofia holds over 30 patents.

Web links

• Biography at the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Institute
• Biography at Bloomberg