Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) announced today that Professor Hualiang Jiang has received an Agilent Thought Leader Award. Professor Jiang directs the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and is a leading researcher in the area of medicinal chemistry and computational drug design.

Professor Jiang has a strong track record identifying new targets for cancer therapy and designing inhibitors that block protein-protein interactions. He and his collaborators designed the first inhibitor of Atox1/CCS and used it to prove that copper chaperones are potential new targets for anticancer therapies. They also designed the first inhibitor of speckle-type POZ protein for potential application to clear-cell renal cell carcinoma.

The Agilent Thought Leader Award will support Professor Jiang in his latest research using novel glycoside-based small molecules to test the potential benefits of an alternative class of inhibitors of the PD-L1/PD-1pathway. His laboratory will measure and compare the metabolic and pharmacologic effects of the small molecule inhibitors against that of benchmark therapeutic PD-L1 antibodies.

“Agilent’s support for leading researchers like Professor Jiang underscores our commitment to accelerating the development of metabolomics and integrated biology workflows for cancer drug discovery and characterization,” said Victor Chan, Agilent vice president, and general manager of Laboratory Solutions for Agilent Greater China.

“It is my great honor to receive an Agilent Thought Leader Award. As a drug designer, I am interested in discovering novel drug candidates from natural products, in particular, natural carbohydrate compounds, against new drug targets,” said Professor Jiang. “Computational drug design and chemical proteomics are the major tools in my research platform. My research team will benefit from the integration of metabolomics data.”

The Agilent Thought Leader Award program promotes fundamental scientific advances by contributing financial support, products, and expertise to the research of influential thought leaders in the life sciences, diagnostics, and chemical analysis space. Further information is available at the Agilent Thought Leader Award web page.