Sitta Sittampalam is raring to go. He has been involved with SBS since its early days and is convinced that the society is “poised to take off.” He is enthusiastic about the society’s future and eager to help SBS move to the next level.

Why did you want to be president of the society and what excites you about this opportunity?

S.S.: The answer is twofold. First, I’m very interested in the society because I’ve seen it grow from just a few hundred members to almost 2000 scientists in our ranks today. I feel strongly that we’re at a crossroads and ready to jump to the next level.

Secondly, because our membership is interdisciplinary, we have a tremendous opportunity, right now, to really take the lead in drug discovery. I am confident that this is the right direction because of my experience of approximately 20 years in a major pharma—and I want to be there, helping SBS position itself at the helm.

What is your vision for the society’s leadership role?

S.S.: I envision that we will be the premier scientific society in the world for drug discovery. We’re the only non-profit in the field right now, and so we need to push to differentiate ourselves from other organizations out there. They may have more resources than we do, but we are a strong society with an interdisciplinary perspective and, as such, we can achieve a stature similar to the American Chemical Society, the American Cancer Society, and other professional societies.

To accomplish this, we will need to go beyond talking about drug discovery, and begin taking our place as leaders in the highly interdisciplinary realm of drug discovery sciences; it’s a subtle but significant step. We need to focus on bringing in all the new areas of information sciences and technology, automation, bioinformatics, systems biology, medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, and so on. We have a very rich area to mine and we have to do that. And we need to take information from all new and established fields to see how they fit together.

We will also need to decide who we want to align with so we can create alliances with other groups, and we need to do more to bring in academia. Several universities are starting graduate level screening programs and have become very attuned to what the drug discovery sciences are all about, so we need to bring them into the fold and offer real world industrial experience.

What will you focus on first?

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