UB medicinal chemist receives ACS Portoghese Lectureship Award

UB medicinal chemist David Heppner has received the 2025 Philip S. Portoghese Lectureship Award from the American Chemical Society (ACS).

The annual award goes to two early-career investigators who have had a major impact on medicinal chemistry research. It is named in honor of Phil Portoghese, editor-in-chief of the ACS Journal of Medicinal Chemistry from 1972 to 2011.

As part of the honor, Heppner, Jere Solo Assistant Professor of Medicinal Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry, will lecture in an ACS webinar on June 12 and at the National ACS Meeting this August in Washington, D.C.

“This recognition is an incredible and unexpected honor, and I’m deeply grateful,” Heppner says. “It’s both validating and motivating to have our still-growing research program acknowledged in this way.”

Heppner’s research focuses on drug discovery, both developing drug candidates and challenging conventional approaches to accelerate the drug discovery process.

 He is principal investigator on a $2.5 million Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that aims to take much of the guesswork out of drug discovery, which is costly, time consuming and often results in failure. His team is probing fundamental questions, like whether there are better ways to measure drug potency and how placement of linker molecules affects fragment-based drug discovery. 

To do this, they are using the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) as a model system. EGFR is a key protein in non-small-cell lung cancer, so inhibiting it can potentially slow or stop the growth of cancer cells.

 Heppner contributed to the discovery of first-in-class allosteric EGFR inhibitors for lung cancer as a postdoc in the renowned kinase structural biology lab of Harvard University faculty member Michael Eck. At UB, his team has already identified key considerations for measuring the activity of EGFR inhibitors and highlighted methodological pitfalls that impact measurement accuracy. 

In a 2022 study published in ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters, Heppner’s team provided the first three-dimensional model of Johnson & Johnson’s chemotherapy-free lung cancer drug, lazertinib (Lazcluze). Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved lazertinib for usage in a therapy to treat non-small-cell lung cancer patients with a key gene mutation.

Heppner spearheaded a special virtual issue on “Structural Biology in Drug Discovery and Development” for the ACS Medicinal Chemistry journals last year.

Prior to joining UB in 2020, Heppner served as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School, the College of Medicine at the University of Vermont and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He received his chemistry PhD from Stanford University and his chemistry bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota.