M.L. Richard Yip, Ph.D., has joined City of Hope to lead the institution’s quest to identify molecules and natural products that hold potential as cancer therapies.
Yip directs the new High Throughput Screening (HTS) Program and is an associate research scientist in the Division of Molecular Medicine. He also participates in City of Hope Cancer Center’s developmental cancer therapeutics efforts. Yip joined City of Hope from the high-throughput screening core at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute.
“Richard Yip will be an important asset to City of Hope and our efforts to bring scientific discoveries rapidly to patients,” said Theodore Krontiris, M.D., Ph.D., executive vice president of medical and scientific affairs and director of City of Hope Cancer Center. “The High Throughput Screening Program will allow us to test thousands of compounds through the use of robotics and manufacturing techniques.”
Yip will be a central component of a multidisciplinary approach to drug discovery that also includes chemical engineering through the new Synthetic and Biopolymer Chemistry Core and computer modeling through the Division of Information Sciences’ Department of Biomedical Informatics.
City of Hope has a library of nearly 80,000 molecules that can be tested against a cancer target to identify potential treatments. Candidate molecules can then be refined, engineered and tested. Scientists working manually would have to labor 80 days nonstop to screen one target against City of Hope’s compound library. But an HTS facility can cut that to eight days.
The HTS Program will be located in the newly acquired Flower Research Building adjacent to City of Hope’s campus in Duarte, Calif.
“Until the recently announced Molecular Libraries Screening Center Network by the National Institutes of Health, there were only about a dozen academic institutions around the United States that have facilities to conduct high-throughput screening,” Yip said. “With increased support from the federal government, HTS will become a scientific standard for research into drug discovery.
“I look forward to collaborating with all the researchers and physicians here at City of Hope in the search for new cancer treatments.”
Yip has earned several awards for his research including the NIH Fellow Award for Research Excellence in 1999 and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Predoctoral Fellowship from 1988 to 1993. Yip received a Bachelor of Science degree in biology and chemistry from Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., and a doctorate in biology from Caltech.
