Dr. Meurice will lead the Southwest Comprehensive Center for Drug Discovery and Development’s computational chemistry efforts, while Co-PI’s Dr. Christopher Hulme, Associate Professor at the UA College of Pharmacy will lead the center’s medicinal chemistry efforts and TGen Sr. Investigator Dr. Spyro Mousses, will lead the high throughput screening efforts. The investigators each have expertise in critical sectors of the drug discovery pipeline, forming a collective team with complementary educational backgrounds and experiences.

More than anything, Nathalie Meurice always wanted to tend to those with medical needs.

And today at TGen, where colleagues know her as Dr. Meurice, she does — though not in the way she once envisioned.

“For a long time, I wanted to be a nurse so I could help patients,’’ Dr. Meurice said without hesitation when asked what set her along the path of her current career.

Born and raised in Soignies, a small town southwest of Brussels in French-speaking Belgium — near where Napoleon met his Waterloo and the modern-day military headquarters of NATO — Meurice’s foray into science and medicine came courtesy of a backhanded compliment.

As Dr. Meurice recalls, she was devastated when a teacher told her she was too talented to be a nurse and that she needed to set her sights higher. Luckily, a high school teacher helped her fall in love with Chemistry.

“Chemistry is everywhere in our lives,’’ said Dr. Meurice. “When I found a connection between chemistry and the life sciences it became a theme throughout my education.’’

Soon after, the woman who once dreamed of becoming a nurse was well on her way to obtaining her doctorate degree at the University of Namur. A city rooted in the Middle Ages, Namur lies at the confluence of the Meuse and Sambre rivers. It is a place of quiet contemplation, where pedestrians rule the academic city center. There, she spent a decade under the research tutelage of Professor Daniel Vercauteren, who Dr. Meurice credits with significantly contributing to her development by instilling scientific rigor and high standards.

Dr. Meurice also discovered that, while she loved working in the laboratory with organic chemistry, the chemicals gave her headaches. Fortunately, an explosion of computer speed and memory provided new opportunities in the newly emerging field of computational chemistry and drug discovery.

Like many successful scientists, Dr. Meurice found a mentor — Dr. Gerald Maggiora — whom she would ultimately shadow from Belgium to Michigan to Tucson, and eventually, Phoenix and TGen.

The two first met at a three-day college symposium on computer-aided discovery. Maggiora, who at the time directed computational chemistry for U.S. drug-maker Upjohn, invited Meurice to visit Upjohn’s operations in Kalamazoo, Michigan. There, she worked as a visiting student for a semester, learning how the pharmaceutical industry used computational chemistry in its drug discovery efforts. She also learned valuable lessons in project management.

“From my earliest interactions with Dr. Meurice at Pharmacia and Upjohn, where she was a visiting student, to my continuing collaborations with her today, she has been an inspiration and a joy to work with,’’ Dr. Maggiora said. “Dr. Meurice is not afraid of new ideas and will charge fearlessly into new fields if that is what’s needed to further her research. Her breadth of knowledge is impressive and includes subjects as diverse as quantum mechanics and biochemistry. This puts her in a good position to drive drug research in today’s highly interdisciplinary environment.”

Like many student-mentor relationships, Meurice’s career followed Maggiora’s, who today is Adjunct Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Arizona’s Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology in the College of Pharmacy and a TGen Adjunct Senior Investigator.

“There is a strong connection there. He’s the link. We always stayed in contact,” said Dr. Meurice, who joined TGen in 2006 as an Adjunct Faculty member, eventually transitioning in 2007 to Associate Investigator.

At TGen, Dr. Meurice’s work focuses on alleviating bottlenecks that exist between the laboratory-based discovery of promising therapeutic targets and the ultimate goal of delivering new, safe and effective drugs to address unmet medical needs of the patient. After nearly 18 months of strategic planning, she recently helped launch the Southwest Comprehensive Center for Drug Discovery and Development (SCCDDD), a joint venture between TGen and the UA College of Pharmacy, funded by a $7.5 million federal economic recovery grant.

Dr. Meurice and her colleagues at the SCCDDD plan to assemble a translational medicinal chemistry team capable of designing and selecting likely drug candidates for rapid response to a host of diseases, including neoplastic, metabolic, cardiovascular, immunological and neurological disorders.

“We will evaluate drug-like compounds for particular targets and determine which compounds have the desired activity,’’ Dr. Meurice said. “What is really unique is that we are taking an industrialized approach to medicinal chemistry that is more likely to have a significant impact on healthcare, and implementing it in academia.’’

Advanced computer analysis synergizing with medicinal chemistry, and validation through laboratory experiments, will facilitate and guide much of the work along the drug discovery value chain.

The SCCDDD will get up and running over the next two years during a build phase, while researchers develop a “portfolio of targets” and produce more than 20,000 potentially beneficial drug-like compounds. The five-year goal is to assemble an Arizona compound collection of about 100,000 small molecules that have promising biological properties.

“The biologists and chemists will work toward a common goal of making a difference for the patients,” she said.

For Dr. Meurice, that fulfills the same goal as her childhood dream of becoming a nurse.

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