Marco De Vivo

Dr. Marco De Vivo is a Senior Researcher Tenured at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) and Principal Investigator of the Molecular Modeling and Drug Discovery Laboratory. His lab develops and applies computational methods to achieve an atomic-level comprehension of pharmaceutically relevant chemical systems. This information is used to design potent inhibitors as a good starting point for drug discovery programs. The lab integrates computational and medicinal chemistry thoroughly combined with structural, biochemical, and pharmacological data. This allows performing structure-based drug design of new molecular entities endowed with the desired pharmacological action. He is also Director of the Italian CECAM-IT-SIMUL node of the CECAM (Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire) organization, which promotes advanced computational methods for important problems in frontier areas of science and technology. In 2020, he co-founded Alyra Therapeutics, a start-up currently based in San Diego (USA), whose mission is to treat melanoma and other cancer types with proprietary drugs that target proteins of the ras oncogene family. In 2017, he received the prestigious ACS Outstanding Junior Faculty Award in computational chemistry. Before joining IIT, he spent more than five years in the USA as a researcher in academia and the biotech industry. He was a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia with Prof. Michael L. Klein, a pioneer in computational chemistry. Later, he joined the biotech Melinta Therapeutics (formerly known as Rib-X Pharmaceuticals, Inc New Haven, CT), working closely with Prof. William L. Jorgensen, a leader in computational drug discovery from Yale University.

Marco has published over 90 publications in peer-reviewed journals, including JACS, Angewandte Chemie, Chem, Nature Communications, Nature Reviews Chemistry. He is co-inventor of 13 patents worldwide on small molecules for pharmaceutical use, generating multimillion-dollar partnerships. He is an active member of the Editorial Advisory Board of top scientific journals in computational chemistry and drug discovery. He sits on the Board of Directors of the Division of Pharmaceutical Chemistry of the Italian Chemical Society (SCI) and is a member of the Technical Scientific Committee (CTS) of the Italian Association for Cancer Research (AIRC). 

Marco holds a M.S. in Chemistry and a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Bologna.