Peter Pallai, Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer
Dr. Peter Pallai has served as CEO of BioBlocks since 2002, and has 23 years of experience in managing drug discovery programs. As head of Medicinal Chemistry Departments at Arqule and Ontogen, he led lead identification and optimization efforts of drug discovery teams utilizing the companies’ parallel chemistry platforms. At Arqule, he served as a leader of the company’s collaborative research program and had an industry-wide overview of hit to lead programs for a multitude of targets. Previously, at Procept Inc. Dr. Pallai developed an interdisciplinary drug discovery platform for protein structure based lead discovery in collaboration with Harvard and MIT investigators. He served as Director of Chemistry and as a leader of the company’s AIDS program, resulting in the development of a clinical candidate. Earlier in his career at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc., he established and led the International Viral Protease Therapeutic Program. Prior to his industrial positions, Dr. Pallai held academic appointments at University of California, San Diego, and was a Fogarty Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Pallai holds a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Szeged, Hungary, and has published numerous scientific papers and co-authored patents on compounds of therapeutic significance.
Dr. Judit Kámán, Director of Chemistry, BioBlocks Hungary
Dr. Kámán joined BioBlocks, Kft. in April 2008 as a project leader. Since this time she has been in charge of developing screening leads into a novel, patentable series, capable of producing a drug candidate in a one to three year time frame. She is currently supervising a team of 18 chemists, responsible for project management, customer relations and communication. During her employment at BioBlocks, she supervised two PhD students, who were working on palladium-catalyzed chemistry. Between 2005 and 2008, Dr. Kámán worked at Ubichem (Soneas), where she was the leader of a four-member group involved in the planning, development and production of organic compounds on scales up to 100's of grams. Previously, Dr. Kámán spent 4 years in a post-doctoral position at Laboratory for Organic and Bio-organic Synthesis, Department of Organic Chemistry, University of Gent, Belgium. Two of these years were supported by the Marie Curie Fellowship. She was awarded a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from University of Szeged. Dr. Kámán is a co-author of 10 publications.