Nicholas Bodor

Biography

Bodor received his B.S./M.S. degree in Organic Chemistry in 1959 at Bolyai University in Transylvania, and his Ph.D. degree in 1965 from the University of Babes-Bolyai, Cluj and the Romanian National Academy of Sciences. He was a Group Leader at the Pharmacochemical Research Institute in Romania until 1968, when he received a R. A. Welch Fellowship at the University of Texas in Austin. In 1972 he became a Senior Research Scientist at ALZA Laboratories in Lawrence, Kansas, which later became INTERx Research Corporation, where he was Director of Research, as well as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Kansas until 1978. Bodor joined the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1979 as Professor and Chairman of the Medicinal Chemistry Department. He was promoted to Graduate Research Professor of the university in 1983. He is the Executive Director of the Center for Drug Discovery in the College of Pharmacy. He also holds appointments as Affiliate Graduate Research Professor in the Department of Chemistry in the College of Liberal Arts and the Department of Ophthalmology in the College of Medicine at the University. During his tenure at the University of Florida, he has supervised the training of more than 50 doctoral students and over 100 postdoctoral level research associates and fellows. In February 2000, he took a leave of absence from his academic posts at UF to accept a position as Senior Vice President of Basic Research and Drug Discovery at the IVAX Corporation. Bodor served as Chief Scientific Officer of the IVAX Corporation, Managing Director of the IVAX Drug Research Institute, Budapest, Hungary, as well as President of the IVAX Research Institute until October 2005, when he returned to the University of Florida as Graduate Research Professor and Executive Director of the Center for Drug Discovery.

Research Interest

Bodor’s main research interests include design of drugs with improved therapeutic index, design of new chemical delivery systems, computer-assisted drug design, drug transport and metabolism, and theoretical and mechanistic organic chemistry. He has published more than 500 research articles, holds more than 180 patents, and is on the editorial boards of several international scientific journals. Bodor is the founder and organizer of a biennial series of symposia entitled, The Retrometabolism Based Drug Design and Targeting Conference, which is dedicated to the study of the drug optimization strategies that he has pioneered. The soft steroid Loteprednol Etabonate, he designed, is on the market in the U.S. and other countries. Other drugs he has designed using the retrometabolic concepts are in advanced clinical development.