Position Announcement: Arris Pharmaceutical

[Tom Dietterich]

                        RESEARCH SCIENTIST in
          Machine Learning, Neural Networks, and Statistics
                         Arris Pharmaceutical

Arris Pharmaceutical is a start-up pharmaceutical company founded in
1989 and dedicated to the efficient discovery and development of
novel, orally-active human therapeutics through the application of
artificial intelligence, machine learning, and pattern recognition
methods.  

We are seeking a person with a PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics,
Statistics, or related fields to join our team developing new machine
learning algorithms for drug discovery.  The team currently includes
contributions from Tomas Lozano-Perez, Rick Lathrop, Roger Critchlow,
and Tom Dietterich.  The ideal candidate will have a strong background
in mathematics (including spatial reasoning methods) and five years'
experience in machine learning, neural networks, or statistical
model-building methods.  The candidate should be eager to learn the
relevant parts of computational chemistry and to interact with
medicinal chemists and molecular biologists.

To a first approximation, the Arris drug design strategy begins by
identifying a pharmaceutical target (e.g., an enzyme or a cell-surface
receptor), developing assays to measure chemical binding with this
target, and screening large libraries of peptides (short amino acid
sequences) with these assays.  The resulting data, which indicates for
each compound, how well it binds to the target, will then be analyzed
by machine learning algorithms to develop hypotheses that explain why
some compounds bind well to the target while others do not.
Information from X-ray crystallography or NMR spectroscopy may also be
available to the learning algorithms.  Hypotheses will then be refined
by synthesizing and testing additional peptides.  Finally, medicinal
chemists will synthesize small organic molecules that satisfy the
hypothesis, and these will become candidate drugs to be tested for
medical safety and effectiveness.  

For more information, send your resume with the names and addresses of
three references to Tom Dietterich (email: tgd at arris.com; voice:
415-737-8600; FAX: 415-737-8590).

Arris Pharmaceutical Corporation
385 Oyster Point Boulevard, Suite 12
South San Francisco, CA 94080