OVERVIEW
Kiruthika, an expert in organic synthesis and medicinal chemistry, joined Haley Guiliano as a Technical Advisor in the Life Sciences Group. She leverages her training in organic chemistry to assist in various intellectual property matters including drafting and prosecuting applications for several pharmaceutical and biotechnology clients.
Before joining the firm, Kiruthika served as a senior scientist at Venenum Biodesign where she facilitated small molecule drug discovery. Her work focused on early-stage drug discovery, identifying hits, and interpreting structure-activity relationships. Her work addressed ADME challenges for lead generation and optimization by designing and constructing scaffolds against novel drug targets in immuno-oncology, infectious diseases, and metabolic disorders.
Kiruthika holds a Ph.D. and M.S. from the University of Madras in Organic Chemistry. Her master’s research constructed three generations of thiophene-BINOL based dendrimers, which attracted the attention of chemists due to their unique chiro-optical and medicinal properties. Kiruthika’s doctoral research focused on methodology development for constructing heterocycles using transition metal catalysis and multi-component reactions involving alkynes. Her work utilized the less-exploited copper-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions of ynamides to develop interesting heterocyclic scaffolds – which have extensive applications in medicinal chemistry and material science in an inter/intramolecular one-pot fashion. She further used multi-component reactions to create spirocycles involving electron-deficient alkynes that are otherwise complex to synthesize.