G. Kurumbail

Biography

Kurumbail is currently a research fellow and a structural biology lab head at Pfizer Worldwide Research & Development at their Groton, Connecticut campus. Ravi was trained as a protein X-ray crystallographer in the laboratory of Professor Alexander Tulinsky at Michigan State University where he worked on crystallographic studies of blood coagulation proteins. Following this, Ravi joined the lab of Professor Johann Deisenhofer at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical center, Dallas as a postdoctoral fellow and solved the structure of a bacterial cytochrome P450. Ravi then moved to St. Louis where he spent the next 13 years at Searle, Monsanto, Pharmacia and eventually Pfizer. While at St. Louis, Dr. Kurumbail elucidated the structure of the membrane protein cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) that is the target of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. He was an active member of the Searle COX-2 team that discovered Celebrex™, Bextra™ and Dynastat™ and contributed to their mechanistic study and regulatory filings. For the past 10 years, Ravi has been leading a structural biology lab at the Pfizer Groton campus.

Research Interest

Over the years, Ravi’s research interests have spanned proteases, protein kinases, hydrolases, cyclooxygenases, cytochrome P450s and proteins involved in blood coagulation and fibrinolysis. Dr. Kurumbail has been actively pursuing structure-based drug design over the past 20+ years in the pharmaceutical industry. He has broad experience in evaluation of kinase inhibitors and activators for a variety of pathological conditions including cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.