Drug Discovery, Designing Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Analysis

Biography

She is an experienced and enthusiastic principal scientist and consultant supporting early drug discovery and lead optimization. Leaving GSK after 22 years of service, she is now founder director of Bio-Mimetic Chromatography Ltd providing data analysis, biomimetic HPLC method development and measurements, in vivo drug distribution modelling and various courses for pharmaceutical companies. She is an Honorary Professor to the UCL School of Pharmacy since 2004; leading the Physchem/ADME module for the Drug Discovery MSc course. She is a Fellow Member of the Royal Society of Chemistry. She has published over 100 papers that have achieved over 3000 citations. She has written a book on “Physicochemical and Biomimetic Properties in Drug Discovery; Chromatographic Techniques for lead optimization” published by Wiley in 2014. The book summarizes the methodology and applications of the measurements of physicochemical and biomimetic properties with examples for in vivo distribution models and applications in drug discovery. Currently, she is working on the second edition of the “Handbook of Analytical Separations” Volume 1 “Separation Methods in Drug Synthesis and Purification” published by Elsevier.

Research Interest

Klara Valko has developed biomimetic HPLC methods for high throughput measurements of serum albumin, glycoprotein and phospholipid binding. She invented the Chromatographic Hydrophobicity Index (CHI) for the fast determination of a compound’s lipophilicity. She has built mathematical statistical models based on measured properties to predict human in vivo drug distribution, such as, volume of distribution, drug efficiency and tissue/plasma partition.