Founded by the Division of Pharmaceutical Chemistry of the Italian Chemical Society, the European School of Medicinal Chemistry (ESMEC) awards the Alumni Award to former students who have become experts in the field of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
Marco De Vivo of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) received the prestigious ESMEC Alumni Award from the European School of Medicinal Chemistry, held in Urbino from July 2 to 6. De Vivo was honored with this recognition twenty years after attending the school, in recognition of his professional successes, including significant achievements in the identification of new drug candidates for skin cancers and neurodevelopmental diseases.
The European School of Medicinal Chemistry (ESMEC) is an international school open to doctoral students and young researchers from both the academic and industrial worlds. Its purpose is to provide training and updates on the latest advances in the field of pharmaceutical chemistry and the transdisciplinary approach that characterizes cutting-edge research in the development of innovative new drugs. The school, now in its 42nd edition, was founded by the Division of Pharmaceutical Chemistry of the Italian Chemical Society and is held at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo. ESMEC has been accredited by the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC) since 2004 and is an “EFMC Certified School” since last year.
The ESMEC Alumni Award is presented to an excellence in the field of Pharmaceutical Chemistry who has participated in the school by giving oral presentations and/or posters and has been at least 12 years since earning their doctoral degree. This prestigious award, now in its third edition, was granted this year to IIT researcher Marco De Vivo, the coordinator of the Molecular Modeling and Drug Discovery laboratory and Associate Director responsible for Computational Sciences at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa.
“I am very honored, grateful, and happy to have received this award as an alumnus of the ESMEC school, which I attended in 2003,” commented Marco De Vivo. “It has been a true privilege to be able to present my research journey to the many young students who attend it today. I hope that my experience can serve as an example, both for the challenges faced and for the successes achieved over time and with dedication. I hope to have contributed to inspiring their desire to improve the scientific field in which they work, towards the discovery of new drugs.”
“This year, we also had the presence of many young researchers from Italy and abroad, with a total of 120 participants and 67 poster presentations by young researchers,” said the school’s director, Marco Macchia. “We are proud to have awarded the prize to Dr. De Vivo because the themes covered by the school in the field of research and development of new molecules as drugs were undoubtedly innovative, from pharmacomicrobiomics to artificial intelligence, and De Vivo’s work is a valid example of this.”
After earning a degree in Chemistry from the University of Bologna and a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the same institution, Marco De Vivo spent over five years in the United States as a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania and at the biotech company Rib-X Pharmaceuticals (now known as Melinta Therapeutics) at Yale. In mid-2009, he returned to Italy to join the IIT in Genoa, where he now leads the Molecular Modeling and Drug Discovery laboratory and serves as the Associate Director responsible for Computational Sciences. De Vivo is also the Director of the Italian node CECAM-IT-SIMUL of the organization CECAM (Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire), which promotes advanced computational methods in frontier areas of science and technology.
De Vivo’s research focuses on the development and application of computational methods to gain an atomic-level understanding of chemical systems and design molecules with programmed properties, so they can be used as a starting point for the discovery of new drugs. His research has practical implications, and he currently serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of BiKi Technologies, a startup that provides innovative tools based on molecular dynamics for drug discovery, and he is the founder of two startups for drug development: one for cancer treatment (Alyra Therapeutics) and another for neurodevelopmental disorders (IAMA Therapeutics).
Some of his research activities are supported by the Italian Association for Cancer Research (AIRC), where he became a member of the Technical Scientific Committee in 2018. In 2017, he received the prestigious “ACS Outstanding Junior Faculty Award” in the United States. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of scientific journals such as JCIM (ACS Publications) and Chem (Cell Press). He is a member of the Board of the Division of Pharmaceutical Chemistry of the Italian Chemical Society and serves as the Executive Editor of the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation (an ACS journal), which is the reference journal for the broad community of computational chemists.
