Brent Clayton, PhD

Brent Clayton, PhD, comes to the IUSM with a background spanning the pharmaceutical industry. Trained as a synthetic organic chemist, he spent 10 years at Albany Molecular, leading teams of chemists designing and synthesizing novel small chemical compounds to support drug discovery programs across a wide variety of therapeutic areas. Later at Evonik in West Lafayette, IN he oversaw the preparation, execution, and completion of manufacturing scale GMP processes to synthesize key intermediates toward pharmaceutical API’s.

In 2021 Dr. Clayton joined the Purdue Institute for Drug Discovery as a principal scientist in medicinal chemistry. As part of the TREAT-AD initiative, he led the PLCG2 team with the goals of developing robust assays and discovering new tool compounds to probe the effectiveness of PLCG2 activation to treat patients with Alzheimer’s disease. A rare coding variant (P522R) has been identified as providing protection against the development of AD, presumably due to its increased activity in microglia cells. In late 2022 he moved to the IUSM to continue his work toward discovering small molecule PLCG2 activators.

Wityak, J.; McGee, K. F.; Conlon, M.P.; Song, R. H.; Duffy, B. C.; Clayton, B.; et al. Lead Optimization toward Proof-of-Concept Tools for Huntington’s Disease within a 4-(1H-Pyrazol-4-yl)pyrimidine Class of Pan-JNK Inhibitors. J. Med. Chem. 2015, 58, 2967–2987.

Ma, Ya.; Shizuka, M.; Guzi, T. J.; Liu, Y.; Tian, Y.; Lahue, B. R.; Gibeau, C. R.; Shipps, G. W., Jr.; Wang, Y.; Bogen, S. L.; Nair, L.; Pan, W.; Voss, M.; Kirova-Snover, M.; Clayton, W. B.; McCoy, M. A.  Substituted Piperidines as HDM2 Inhibitors. PCT WO 2013/096150 A1.