As the Director of Translational Biology at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in Orlando, Florida, Siobhan Malany, PhD, leads an interdisciplinary team of biologists and medicinal chemists and a diverse drug discovery portfolio for non-profit and commercial partners for the purposes of translation medical discoveries. She also provides assay development and scientific consultation to investigators to compete for various funding opportunities. Siobhan is a key contributor in the development of toxicological platforms using human iPSC-derived stem cells, a bicoastal collaboration funded by the USAF.
Prior to joining Sanford Burnham Prebys in 2010, she spent eight years in the San Diego biotechnology industry. At Tanabe Research Laboratories, a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma, she led the biochemistry group with a focus on targets in metabolic disease and autoimmune therapeutic areas. At Neurocrine Biosciences, she led pharmacology lead optimization efforts for G-protein coupled receptor programs in CNS and contributed to the IND for a novel sleep drug.
Her early career research focused on establishing quantitative, mechanistic pharmacological structure-function models of protein inhibition. She was a Center for Biocatalysis and Bioprocessing PhD fellow in bioorganic chemistry at the University of Iowa and was a Tobacco-Related Disease Research postdoctoral fellow in pharmacology at the University of CA, San Diego. She was recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship to extend her studies at the Max-Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt, Germany.
Siobhan is also the founder of Sanford Burnham Prebys’ first spin-off company, micro-gRx, Inc., which studies the effects of microgravity on human muscle myocytes.