Ariel Fernandez

Ariel Fernandez
Born	(1957-04-08) April 8, 1957 Bahía Blanca, Argentina
Residence	Buenos Aires Houston
Citizenship	Argentina USA
Nationality	Argentinian
Fields	Biophysics Statistical mechanics Drug design
Institutions	University of Miami Rice University
Alma mater	Universidad Nacional del Sur Yale University
Thesis	Structural Stability of Chemical Systems at Critical Regimes (1984)
Doctoral advisor	Oktay Sinanoğlu
Doctoral students	Jianping Chen[1] Xi Zhang[2]
Known for	Dehydrons
Website http://www.profarielfernandez.com/

Ariel Fernandez (born Ariel Fernández Stigliano, April 8, 1957) is an Argentinian–American physical chemist and pharmaceutical researcher.^[3]

Education and early career

Fernandez received Licentiate degrees in Chemistry (1979) and Mathematics (1980) from the Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina.^[3] He then earned a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1984 with a thesis entitled Structural Stability of Chemical Systems at Critical Regimes^[4] in the lab of Oktay Sinanoğlu. His early published papers also list him as being associated with the Weizmann Institute of Science, Princeton University, and the University of California at San Diego. He was a senior researcher in the division of Nobel laureate Manfred Eigen at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry.^[3]

Career

Fernandez held the Karl F. Hasselmann Professorship of Bioengineering at Rice University until 2011.^[5] He is a member of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Argentina.^[6] Fernandez is listed as an editor for multiple journals published by OMICS Publishing Group. He does biotechnology consulting and has been involved with startups.^[3]

Fernandez developed the concept of the dehydron,^[7] an adhesive structural defect in a soluble protein that promotes its own dehydration.^[8] A dehydron consists of an intramolecular hydrogen bond that is "underwrapped" or incompletely shielded from attack by water in the protein's solvation shell.^[9] Dehydrons cause "epistructural tension", that is, interfacial tension around the protein structure^[10] and thus promote protein–protein interactions and protein–ligand associations.^[11] The nonconserved nature of protein dehydrons has implications for drug discovery, as dehydrons may be targeted by highly specific drugs/ligands engineered to improve dehydron wrapping upon binding.^[12] Thus, dehydrons constitute effective selectivity filters for drug design, giving rise to so-called "wrapping technology", a platform to design safer drugs.^[13] This technology was first applied by Fernandez and collaborators to redesign the anticancer drug Gleevec, in order to remove its potential cardiotoxicity.^[14][15] In a recent patent applying wrapping technology, dehydron-rich regions in a specific protein were targeted by Richard L. Moss and Ariel Fernandez to design drug leads to cure heart failure.^[16]

Fernandez has published books and peer-reviewed articles.^[17][18] Four of his articles have been questioned by journals that had earlier accepted them. Publications in BMC Genomics,^[19][20] Nature,^[21][22] and PLOS Genetics^[23][24] have been flagged with expressions of concern, and publication of an article in Annual Review of Genetics has been withheld.^[25][26] In 2006, a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article was retracted as an apparent duplicate publication.^[27][28] Fernandez responded saying that no evidence has been published in the scientific literature that the data in those papers are invalid.^[29]

Awards

Fernandez was awarded the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Distinguished New Faculty in 1989;^[3] the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar in 1991;^[30] a Guggenheim fellowship in 1995;^[31] and is an Elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2006).^[32]

Published works

Books

• Transformative Concepts for Drug Design: Target Wrapping, by Ariel Fernández (ISBN 978-3642117916, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010).
• Biomolecular Interfaces, by Ariel Fernández Stigliano (ISBN 978-3319168494, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2015).
• Physics at the Biomolecular Interface, by Ariel Fernández (ISBN 978-3319308517, Springer International Publishing AG, Switzerland, 2016).

Articles

According to his Google Scholar profile,^[33] Fernandez's highest-cited articles include:

• Fernández, A; Berry, RS (2003). "Proteins with H-bond packing defects are highly interactive with lipid bilayers: Implications for amyloidogenesis". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 100 (5): 2391–2396. doi:10.1073/pnas.0335642100. 
• Fernández, A; Kardos, J; Scott, LR; Goto, Y; Berry, RS (2003). "Structural defects and the diagnosis of amyloidogenic propensity". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 100 (11): 6446–6451. doi:10.1073/pnas.0731893100. 
• Fernández, A; Scheraga, HA (2003). "Insufficiently dehydrated hydrogen bonds as determinants of protein interactions". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 100 (1): 113–118. doi:10.1073/pnas.0136888100. 
• Fernández, A; Scott, R (2003). "Dehydron: a structurally encoded signal for protein interaction". Biophysical Journal. 85 (3): 1914–1928. PMC 1303363 . PMID 12944304. doi:10.1016/s0006-3495(03)74619-0. 
• Fernández, A; Sanguino, A; Peng, Z; Ozturk, E; Chen, J; Crespo, A; Wulf, S; et al. (2007). "An anticancer C-Kit kinase inhibitor is reengineered to make it more active and less cardiotoxic". The Journal of Clinical Investigation. 117 (12): 4044–4054. doi:10.1172/jci32373. CS1 maint: Explicit use of et al. (link)

References

External links

• Ariel Fernandez Consultancy
• Ariel Fernandez Innovation