Dr. McMaster, PhD, is the Carnegie and Rockefeller Professor and Chair of Pharmacology at Dalhousie University where he holds a Canada Research Chair in Biosignalling. He is also co-director of the Cheminformatics Drug Discovery Lab at the IWK Health Centre. Dr. McMaster has twice been ranked first in Canada in national salary award competitions, as a fellow and a scholar, by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research. He was also ranked first in the province of Nova Scotia as a Clinical Research Scholar and has been awarded a teaching excellence award by the Dalhousie University Student Union. Dr. Christopher McMaster is on a mission to bring new medicines to diseases for which there is an unmet need. To do so, he has built several teams of clinicians, scientists, and business experts to move Nova Scotia based discoveries into the clinic and market.

Dr. McMaster has assembled a team of Nova Scotia based scientists, clinicians, and business development experts is inherited ‘orphan diseases’. Dr. McMaster is the lead investigator of a $4.9 million Genome Canada project entitled Orphan Diseases: Identifying Genes and New Therapies to Enhance Treatment (IGNITE). The IGNITE team is united around the theme of improving the livelihood of orphan disease patients. While individually rare, affecting less than 1 in 2000 people each, there are ~7000 orphan diseases such that 1 in 12 individuals has an orphan disease. The cumulative effect is that ~50 million people across North America and Europe suffer the health impacts due to an orphan disease. Indeed, 90% of orphan diseases have no cure, 90% are life-limiting, and 50% affect children. The goal of the IGNITE team is to deliver new therapies for orphan disease patients in dramatically compressed timeframes at reduced cost.

A second unmet need resulted in DeNovaMed, a Halifax based biotechnology company co-founded by Dr. McMaster to bring to the market the first truly new class of antibiotic in the past 30 years. Dr. McMaster has served as President of DeNovaMed since its founding in 2006. The DeNovaMed team has developed a platform of over 500 new chemical entities that comprise a truly new class of antibiotics. They developed this class using computer aided drug design and a variety of specialized drug synthesis approaches and biological assays. The breakthrough proprietary technology is an innovative family of small molecules (ie. new drugs) that kill bacteria by inhibiting an enzyme essential for lipid metabolism. DeNovaMed’s compound class has been validated in vitro for many Gram positive bacteria and in vivo versus the ‘superbug’ MRSA in a topical model of infection. With the increasing prevalence of antibiotic resistant superbugs current treatments are becoming less effective to the point that they may to be usable for the majority of infections in the nest 5-10 years. Indeed, MRSA was responsible for over 50,000 deaths across North America and Europe in 2011. The DeNovaMed team aims to have ‘first in human’ trials of their new class of antibiotics in early 2014 to bring to the market the first truly new class of antibiotic for the past 30 years.