Comprehensive Glycoscience

Dr. Barchi received his Ph.D. in Synthetic/Marine Natural Products Chemistry from the University of Hawaii and was a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University. He then joined the National Cancer Institute as a staff fellow in the Laboratory of Medicinal Chemistry in1988 where he rose to his current position of Senior Scientist/Principal Investigator and NMR Facility Head at the newly formed Chemical Biology Laboratory. His main research interests are in synthetic medicinal chemistry as it relates to carbohydrate-based drug design, the development of novel sugar-conjugated nanoparticles and the high-resolution structural analysis of sugars, glycopeptides and small molecule drug candidates by NMR spectroscopy. Dr Barchi's career at the NCI has spanned a wide breadth of drug discovery efforts, including the synthesis of PKC and reverse transcriptase inhibitors, the development of glycopeptide antigens as vaccine candidates against HIV and cancer, as well as the discovery of several glycopeptide-analogues of Antiproliferative Factor (APF), a negative growth factor isolated from patients with interstitial cystitis. Current focus in the lab is the discovery of novel nanoplatforms for the delivery and therapeutic applications of immunogenic glycopeptides, the search for selective antitumor agents based on APF and the conformational analysis of these synthetic analogues by NMR spectroscopy to guide further discovery efforts. He is on the editorial board of Current Cancer Drug Targets (Bentham Science Publishers) and Carbohydrate Research (Elsevier) and was a guest editor for Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry (Bentham Science Publishers), on The Art of Drug Design and Discovery. He has an h-index of 35.