Researcher profile

Rino Ragno

Rino Ragno is a full professor at the Pharmacy and Medicine Faculty of Sapienza University of Rome. Rino Ragno took his Degrees cum Laude "Laurea in Chimica e Tecnologia Farmaceutiche" in 1989 and in Pharmacy, also cum Laude, in 1992 at Rome University “La Sapienza” in the laboratory of Medicinal Chemistry directed by Prof. Silvio Massa. From 1990 to 2000 worked as assistant researcher in the laboratories of Prof. G.C. Porretta and Prof. Marino Artico doing synthesis as medicinal chemist. During this decade he started to train himself as a medicinal chemistry designer using computational chemistry tools. In 1996 and 1998 as Italian NIH fellow spent two years in the Center for Molecular Design at Washington University in St. Louis directed by Prof. Garland R. Marshall reaching a high level of experience in the field of computational methods applied to medicinal chemistry. Since 2000 he started a new medicinal chemistry design laboratory, named RCMD (Rome Center for Molecular Design http://www.rcmd.it) with the aim to apply computational methodologies in the field of medicinal chemistry. The very recent scientific production has been focused on several projects mainly focused in three major fields: (1) design and synthesis of anti-HIV compounds; (2) molecular modeling design of new compound capable of interacting with enzymatic and non-enzymatic proteins involved in transcriptional processes activation and chromatin remodeling and (3) Development of software to build QSAR an 3-D QSAR models either LBDD or SBDD; (4) Essential oil extraction from fresh and dried plants their chemical analysis (GC/MS) and biological evaluation. Since his degree dissertation he published 155 international papers many of which at high impact factor, moreover he presented more than 160 posters at international meetings and several oral presentation. At Sapienza University of Rome Prof. Rino Ragno is in charge of teaching medicinal chemistry at bachelor and master level degree courses and also at PhD students. Recently Prof. Rino Ragno opened the very first 3-D QSAR web portal (www.3d-qsar.com) where any user can build ligand-based or structure-based 3-D QSAR models from scratch starting just from a list of SMILES structures and their associated bioactivities. From May 2016 to Decembre 2019 Prof Rino Ragno was the co-founder and CEO of a company named Alchemical Dynamics (www.alchemicaldynamics.com) started with the purpose to build a bridge between big companies and academic worlds.