Ariel Fernandez | |
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Born | Bahía Blanca, Argentina | April 8, 1957
Citizenship |
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Alma mater | |
Known for | Dehydrons |
Scientific career | |
Fields | |
Institutions | |
Thesis | Structural Stability of Chemical Systems at Critical Regimes (1984) |
Doctoral advisor | Oktay Sinanoğlu |
Website | www |
Ariel Fernandez (born Ariel Fernández Stigliano, April 8, 1957) is an Argentinian–American physical chemist and pharmaceutical researcher.[1]
Fernandez received Licentiate degrees in Chemistry (1979) and Mathematics (1980) from the Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina.[1] He then earned a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1984 with a thesis entitled Structural Stability of Chemical Systems at Critical Regimes[2][1]
Fernandez held the Karl F. Hasselmann Professorship of Bioengineering at Rice University until 2011.[3][better source needed] He is a member of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Argentina.[4]
Fernandez developed the concept of the dehydron, an adhesive structural defect in a soluble protein that promotes its own dehydration.[5] The nonconserved nature of protein dehydrons has implications for drug discovery, as dehydrons may be targeted by highly specific drugs/ligands.[6] This technology was applied by Fernandez and collaborators to design a new compound based on the anticancer drug Gleevec, in order to reduce its cardiotoxicity.[7][8] In laboratory tests, the new compound was similar to Gleevec in inhibiting gastrointestinal stromal tumors, but without toxic effects on cardiac cells, although it lacked Gleevec's inhibitory effects on leukemia cells.[8]
The editorial board of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences retracted a January 2006 paper coauthored by Fernandez because it had "substantial overlap", without attribution, of figures and text from an article by Fernandez published in Structure the previous month, a form of duplicate publication.[9] The website Retraction Watch has documented incidences of scientific concerns about some of Fernandez's other publications, claims that Fernandez has denied.[10]
Fernandez was awarded a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award for early-career researchers in 1991;[11] a Guggenheim Fellowship for researchers in Latin America and the Caribbean in 1995;[12] and was elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering for his "contributions to understanding protein folding and protein-protein interactions and the use of this knowledge to design new drugs", in 2006.[13]