S. Martinez Gonzalez

Sonia Martínez was graduated from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Organic Chemistry in 1991. Once she finished her graduation she did a stay period of 6 months at the chemical company Exchem Ltd, in UK, as a fellowship of the European Commet Program. In September of 1992 she moved at the Instituto de Química Orgánica (CSIC) in Madrid working for 15 months on the application of sammarium chemistry to carbohydrates in order to obtain enantiomerically pure carbocycles highly funtionalized, in one pot reaction. Her Medicinal Chemistry education and contact with the pharma industry began in December 1993 when she joined GlaxoSmithKline (former GlaxoWellcome) to do her Ph.D. with a grant from the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia to search for “Phosphomannose Isomerase inhibitors as antifungal targets”. As a result of 4 years thesis work in GlaxoWellcome (1993-1997) she was awarded with her Ph.D. in 1998 at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. At the end of 1997 she was appointed as Laboratory Head at the Spanish biotechnology company Roviall Química, Murcia, Spain, where she focused on the design and synthesis of libraries of compounds applying High Throughput Synthetic Technologies. In December 1998 she joined Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research (a division of Janssen Cilag, Toledo, Spain) where she worked for 10 years as a Senior Scientist in the High Throughput Medicinal Chemistry Group (leading this group for 1 year) and in the Medicinal Chemistry Units. During this time she was involved in different drug discovery projects working mainly on CNS area as well as on metabolic disorders and oncology projects. In October 2008 Sonia Martínez joined the CNIO as Head of Medicinal Chemistry Section. During these 10 years she has been leading/co-leading the “early Drug Discovery” Projects of the Experimental Therapeutics Programme of CNIO applying the standards and requirements of the pharma industry. The aim of the Programme is the delivery of advanced “small organic compounds” with demonstrated in vivo Proof of Concept and guaranteed intellectual property. She is coordinating the medicinal chemistry contribution to the drug discovery projects and she is responsible of the design of hits, generation of novel chemical space and multifactorial optimization of the initial hits to achieve the main objectives of the Programme as well as the protection of the intellectual property behind the discoveries. During this time, she has contributed to the delivery of advanced candidates with demonstrated in vivo Proof-of-Concept results and optimized profiles in several projects as novel cancer therapies: PI3K inhibitors , PIM inhibitors (licenced to Inflection Biosciences) and ATR inhibitors (licenced to Merck Serono).