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Francis Raymond (Ray) Salemme (8 June 1945, Norwood, MA, USA) is a prominent structural biologist and successful American entrepreneur. He is best known for his pioneering work in protein crystallography and the founding of 3-Dimensional Pharmaceuticals, a Nasdaq-listed biotechnology company that developed several ground-breaking technologies for precision and high-throughput drug discovery and was acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2013.

Education
Salemme was admitted at Yale University as a high school junior at the age of 16, where he studied Molecular Biophysics, receiving his B.A. with exceptional distinction in 1967. During his undergraduate studies, he spent a year as a shipboard scientist and able-bodied seaman aboard the oceanographic research vessel USNS Robert D. Conrad where he circumnavigated the earth (~70,000 nautical miles) to map tectonic plate boundaries and perform seismic profiling and deep core sampling of geological features on the ocean floor.

Upon his graduation from Yale, he moved to the University of California San Diego (UCSD) where he received his Ph.D. in Chemistry under the direction of Joseph Kraut in 1972. His doctoral work resulted in the determination of the crystal structure of cytochrome c2, one of the first protein structures to be determined at near atomic resolution using X-ray crystallography.

From 1972 to 1973, he was a postdoctoral fellow at UCSD with M.D. Kamen studying electron transport mechanisms, while simultaneously designing and constructing the UCSD steam-powered car for the CalTech-MIT coast-to-coast clear air car race, along with Stanley Miller and Rodney Burton.

Career and research
Following his postdoctoral training, Salemme joined the faculty at the University of Arizona in 1973 as an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry, eventually rising to the rank of Full Professor in 1982. While at Arizona, he determined several protein crystal structures using X-ray techniques, authored pioneering papers on biological electron transfer mechanisms, principles of protein architecture, and the role of dynamics in protein function, and built a digital coordinate measuring machine to replace the plumb bob.

In 1983, Salemme left academia and joined Genex Corporation as Director of the Protein Engineering department, one of the first integrated research teams in the biotechnology industry to successfully engineer proteins using a combination of protein crystallography and computer-aided design methods. At Genex, he developed pioneering technology for rapid protein structure determination using 2-dimensional X-ray area detectors, designed and engineered the first single-chain Fv antibodies for diagnostic and therapeutic applications, and developed advanced computer programs for protein engineering to produce improved catalysts with properties suitable for industrial process environments.

In 1985, Salemme moved to DuPont Central Research and Development and then DuPont Merck Pharmaceuticals where he built and supervised a multidisciplinary group of biophysicists, crystallographers, computational chemists, and applied mathematicians, oversaw the crystal structure determination of several therapeutically relevant proteins such as streptavidin, protocatechuate dioxygenase, interleukin 1ß, phospholipase A2, and several retroviral proteases, and developed and commercialized the first robotic system for protein crystallization.

In 1991, he joined Sterling Winthrop Pharmaceuticals as Senior Director of Biophysics and Computational Chemistry, where he established and directed a new department that consolidated technical resources for structure-based drug discovery and rational drug design across the company.

In 1993, Salemme left Sterling Winthrop to found 3-Dimensional Pharmaceuticals (3DP), a biopharmaceutical company that focused on the development of pioneering technologies on the interface of structure-based drug design, combinatorial chemistry, high-throughput screening, and computing, and the discovery of drugs for cardiovascular disease and cancer. As 3DP’s President and Chief Scientific Officer, Salemme raised over $40 million in equity-backed capital, assembled a Scientific Advisory Board comprised of prominent life science luminaries including the 2013 Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt from Stanford, the late Lasker Award winner Don Wiley from Harvard, the current Editor of Science and former NIH NIGMS Director and Johns Hopkins University professor Jeremy Berg, and now retired Princeton University professor Clarence Schutt, developed an aggressive intellectual property strategy and formed collaborations and licensing agreements with several biopharmaceutical companies, and secured an ~$85 million investment in its initial public offering in August 2000 (NASDAQ:DDDP), which valued the company at ~$335 million. The technologies that Salemme pioneered at 3DP include ThemoFluor®, an integrated software and instrumentation solution for label-free drug screening and related applications requiring thermodynamic measurements of protein stability; DirectedDiversity®, an AI-driven adaptive drug optimization process control technology that enabled directed exploration of chemical space using machine intelligence and robotic parallel synthesis and biological screening; and DisoverWorks®, an integrated data management and analytics platform designed to increase the productivity of the drug discovery process and enable scientists to optimize drug candidates. The computational and cheminformatics codes developed at 3DP became the foundation of Johnson & Johnson’s ABCD discovery informatics platform, which has been in continuous use since 2005 to enable every drug discovery program at Johnson & Johnson.

Following 3DP’s acquisition by Johnson & Johnson in 2003, Salemme joined Redpoint Bio Corporation as Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of Directors, where he developed its strategic and technical plans and led the discovery of chemosensation modulators, allowing the use of reduced quantities of sugar in food and beverage applications, and the modulation of incretin secretion for diabetes and obesity.

In 2004, and while at Redpoint Bio, Salemme co-founded with his wife, Patricia Weber, Imiplex, a nanotechnology company focused on the development of specialized computer codes for engineering nanostructures for life and material science applications, where he still serves as President.

Salemme is the author of XX peer-reviewed publications and book chapters and a co-inventor of XX patents. He has an h-index of 48 and more than 10,000 citations.

Awards
In 1978, Salemme received the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award while at the University of Arizona.