Mihai D. Azimioara is currently Senior Staff Scientist in the Chemistry Department at 1859, Inc. in San Diego. He has more than 25 years of experience in drug discovery.
He received his BSc in Chemistry from California Institute of Technology in 1989 and MA in Organic Chemistry from Harvard University in 1996. After spending a number of years in expanding his drug discovery expertise at Biogen, ARIAD Pharmaceuticals (currently Takeda Oncology), Tanabe Research Labs, Arena Pharmaceuticals and Ambit Biosciences, he spent almost 15 years at Novartis (GNF) in San Diego helping to bring to preclinical stage a number of projects for treatment of diabetes, cancer, auto-immune diseases, and cystic fibrosis. Since leaving Novartis, Mihai has worked first with Plexium, and currently with 1859, Inc. in developing technology platforms that could speed up and expand the drug-discovery process, including efforts to modulate the activity of biological targets that have been proven difficult to address.
Mihai is a coauthor of over 25 patents and almost 20 peer-reviewed articles.