Francesco Gentile is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biomolecular Sciences at the University of Ottawa and a Principal Investigator at the Ottawa Institute of Systems Biology. He is a recognized expert in computer-aided therapeutic discovery and the developer of widely adopted tools such as DockBox and Deep Docking, now used in academic and industrial pipelines worldwide.
Dr. Gentile earned his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Bioengineering at Politecnico di Torino before pursuing a Ph.D. in computational physics at the University of Alberta. His doctoral work focused on designing small-molecule inhibitors of DNA repair proteins to improve cancer chemotherapy and was supported by an Alberta Innovates scholarship. In 2019, he joined the Vancouver Prostate Centre as a postdoctoral fellow, where he advanced machine learning approaches for structure-based virtual screening. His work contributed to the discovery of inhibitors targeting SARS-CoV-2 main protease and drug-resistant prostate and breast cancer proteins, supported by prestigious fellowships from CIHR, the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research, Vancouver Coastal Health/VGH & UBC Hospital Foundation, and the Ermenegildo Zegna Founder’s Scholarship.
Dr. Gentile has co-authored several publications in leading journals such as ACS Central Science, Nature Communications, Nature Machine Intelligence, Chemical Science, and Nature Protocols, along with three book chapters and a patent. His research program, supported by NSERC, CIHR, and Mitacs, spans cancer, neurological disorders, and viral infections. He is also a co-founder of InVirtuo Laboratories, a Swiss AI-driven drug discovery startup.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.