Biomedical engineer awarded grant

Pengyu Ren, a biomedical engineering assistant professor, received a five-year, $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop software that will improve the process of identifying the most effective chemical structures for new drugs. Ren will develop tools for identifying better drugs to treat arthritis, cancer and other diseases by improving the understanding of how well a potential drug recognizes a protein target in the human body. He will then be able to make these predictions about drug candidates based on computer modeling and simulations of the physical forces acting between a potential drug and its target protein.