Ariel Fernandez

Education and early career

Fernandez received Licentiate degrees in Chemistry (1979) and Mathematics (1980) from the Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina. He then earned a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1984 with a thesis entitled Structural Stability of Chemical Systems at Critical Regimes in the lab of Oktay Sinanoğlu. His early published papers also list him as being associated with the Weizmann Institute of Science, Princeton University, and the University of California at San Diego. He was a senior researcher in the division of Nobel laureate Manfred Eigen at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry.

Career

Fernandez held the Karl F. Hasselmann Professorship of Bioengineering at Rice University until 2011. He is a member of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Argentina. Fernandez is listed as an editor for multiple journals published by OMICS Publishing Group. He does biotechnology consulting and has been involved with startups.

Fernandez developed the concept of the dehydron, an adhesive structural defect in a soluble protein that promotes its own dehydration. A dehydron consists of an intramolecular hydrogen bond that is "underwrapped" or incompletely shielded from attack by water in the protein's solvation shell. Dehydrons cause "epistructural tension", that is, interfacial tension around the protein structure and thus promote protein–protein interactions and protein–ligand associations. The nonconserved nature of protein dehydrons has implications for drug discovery, as dehydrons may be targeted by highly specific drugs/ligands engineered to improve dehydron wrapping upon binding. Thus, dehydrons constitute effective selectivity filters for drug design, giving rise to so-called "wrapping technology", a platform to design safer drugs. This technology was first applied by Fernandez and collaborators to redesign the anticancer drug Gleevec, in order to remove its potential cardiotoxicity. In a recent patent applying wrapping technology, dehydron-rich regions in a specific protein were targeted by Richard L. Moss and Ariel Fernandez to design drug leads to cure heart failure.

Fernandez has published books and peer-reviewed articles. Four of his articles have been questioned by journals that had earlier accepted them. Publications in BMC Genomics, Nature, and PLOS Genetics have been flagged with expressions of concern, and publication of an article in Annual Review of Genetics has been withheld. In 2006, a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article was retracted as an apparent duplicate publication. Fernandez responded saying that no evidence has been published in the scientific literature that the data in those papers are invalid.

Awards

Fernandez was awarded the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Distinguished New Faculty in 1989; the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar in 1991; a Guggenheim fellowship in 1995; and is an Elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2006).

Books

Articles

According to his Google Scholar profile, Fernandez's highest-cited articles include: