Stephen Palmer, PhD

Stephen Palmer received his PhD from University of Illinois, completed postdoctoral fellowship at North Carolina State University and entered the pharmaceutical drug discovery environment with Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Development. For the past 34 years his focus in drug discovery for women’s health indications continued from Program Director at Serono Research Institute, Global Head of Reproductive Health Research at Merck KGaA, CEO/CSO at TocopheRx, Associate Professor and Director of Drug Discovery at Baylor College of Medicine and now returning as CSO at Celmatix. His drug discovery efforts have included oral contraceptives, enzymatic inhibitors to reduce uterine fibroid growth, recombinant gonadotropins for female and male infertility, fusion immune-modulator gonadotropins for implantation failure, oxytocin antagonist and prostanoid modulators for pre-term labor, ovulation induction, and cervical dysplasia, recombinant cytokines for in vitro maturation of oocytes, genetic and soluble biomarkers of embryo viability, small molecule gonadotropin agonists, small molecule gonadotropin receptor antagonists, use of DNA-encoded chemical libraries to discover therapeutics for rare genetic diseases, fibrodysplasia ossificans, heterotopic ossification, . His recent efforts with DNA-encoded chemical libraries include panels of kinase inhibitors developed to address immune intervention for endometriosis and regulation of nerve recruitment to endometriosis lesions, and inhibit progression of chronic inflammation into oncologic diseases including chondrosarcoma, hepatocarcinoma, endometrial cancer and cachexia management.. He is now bringing this broad experience in drug discovery into Celmatix at a time when there is renewed demand for treatments for gynecologic and obstetric diseases.