David M. Ferguson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry, Fellow of the Supercomputing Institute for Digital Simulation and Advanced Computation, Associate Director of the Center for Drug Design, and a graduate faculty member of several interdisciplinary programs across the University.

Education:

B.S., Bucknell University, 1983
Ph.D., University of South Florida, 1989

Research Interests:

My lab is interested in the design and discovery of new therapeutics using both traditional structure-based drug design methods and high throughput screening techniques. For more than a decade, we have been leaders in the development and application of structural models of opioid receptors to understand the molecular basis to ligand binding, selectivity, and receptor activation.  Our lab uses molecular biology, chemical synthesis, and computational techniques to guide the design and discovery of ligands with modified selectivity to the mu, delta, and kappa receptors and to explore the ligand mediated mechanism of receptor activation.

We have also become quite active in the design and synthesis of focused chemical libraries for screening against antiviral and anticancer targets as well as the design and development of high throughput screens (HTS). Our lab has developed a chemical library with diverse biological activities.  Compounds in this library have shown good activity against West Nile Virus (and related flaviviruses), herpes, HIV, and reductions in cell proliferation in a variety of cancers. Work is also performed to explore structure activity relationship (SAR) data among library members and to determine the mechanism of action of “hits” identified via HTS.

Publications:

Goodell, J. R.; Madhok, A. A.; Hiasa, H.; Ferguson, D. M. Synthesis and Evaluation of Acridine- and Acridone-Based AntiHerpes Agents with Topoisomerase Activity, Bioorg. Med. Chem., 14, 5467-80, 2006.

Kane, B., E.; Nieto, M. J.; McCurdy, C., R.; Ferguson, D. M. A Unique Binding Epitope for Salvinorin A, a Non-Nitrogenous kappa-Opioid Receptor Agonist, FEBS Journal, 273, 1966-74, 2006.

McFadyen, I.; Metzger, T.; Subramanian, G.; Poda G.; Jorvig E.; Ferguson, D.M. Molecular modeling of opioid receptor-ligand complexes. Prog. Med. Chem., 40, 107-135, 2002.

Mo, Y.; Subramanian, G.; Gao. J.; Ferguson, D. M. Cation- Interactions: An Energy Decomposition Analysis and Its Implication in -Opioid Receptor-Ligand Binding,  J. Am. Chem. Soc. 124,  4832-4837, 2002.

McFadyen, I. J.; Metzger, T. G.; Paterlini, M. G.; Ferguson, D. M. Exploring the unique pharmacology of a novel opioid receptor, ZFOR1, using molecular modeling and the message-address concept. Prot. Engineering, 14, 953-60, 2001.

Metzger, T. G.; Paterlini, M. G.; Ferguson, D. M.; Portoghese, P. S. Investigation of the selectivity of oxymorphone- and naltrexone-derived ligands via site-directed mutagenesis of opioid receptors: Exploring the 'address' recognition locus. J. Med. Chem., 44, 857-862, 2001.

Podlogar, B.; Ferguson,  D. M. QSAR and CoMFA: A perspective on the practical application to drug discovery. Drug Design and Discovery. 17, 4-12, 2000.

Podlogar, B.; Poda, G. I.; Demeter, D. A.; Zhang, S. P.; Carson,J. R.; Neilson, L. A.; Reitz, A. B. Ferguson, D. M. Synthesis and evaluation of 4-(N,N-diarylamino)piperidines with high selectivity to the delta-opioid receptor:A combined 3D-QSAR and ligand docking study. Drug Design and Discovery. 17, 34-50, 2000.

Subramanian, G.; Paterlini, M. G.; Portoghese, P. S.; Ferguson, D. M. Molecular docking reveals a novel binding site for fentanyl at the mu-opioid receptor. J. Med. Chem., 43, 381-91, 2000.

D. Venkateswarlu and D.M. Ferguson. Effects of C2'-Substitution on Arabinonucleic Acid Structure and Conformation. J. Am. Chem. Soc., 121, 5609-5610 (1999).