Faculty Profile

Dr Muhammad Saeed Joined LUMS in 2014 as an Associate Professor. He established the Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry (BMC) group in The Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. Originally trained as synthetic organic chemist, he has extensive postdoctoral research experience at the interface of chemistry and biology. He is interested to address the modern challenges in biological sciences and medicinal chemistry by using the tools of organic chemistry. More specifically, he pursues rational antiviral and anticancer drug designing and discovery by using modern day techniques of computational modeling, protein dynamics and simulations, supported by the conventional wet-chemistry of organic synthesis and high-throughput screening of synthetic compounds and natural products.

Dr Saeed received his PhD degree in organic chemistry from Eberhard-Karls University of Tuebingen, Germany under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Dr (hc mult) Wolfgang Voelter, after accomplishing total syntheses of several natural products and medicinal analogs using the chirality and topology of abundant carbohydrates. After PhD, he joined the research group of Prof. Ercole Cavalieri, DSc at the Eppley Cancer Institute, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, USA, where he participated as chemical biologist in mechanistic investigation of cancer initiation by estrogens and related carcinogenic compounds. Before joining LUMS, he has also spent some time in the Department of Chemistry, University of Iowa, where he worked as a visiting assistant professor as well as conducted research as postdoctoral scholar with Prof. Amnon Kohen, DSc in the area of development of radiopharmaceuticals as positron emission tomography (PET) tracers. He has published around 50 research articles in reputed international journals, such as J. Biol. Chem., Int. J. Cancer, Free Rad. Biol. Med. Chem. Res. Toxicol., and Tetrahedron Lett. His is currently investigating proteases of different viruses (COVID-19, dengue, HCV) as drug targets for designing efficient direct-acting antivirals (DAAs).

Click here to view Dr. Saeed’s research group webpage