Hugo Kubinyi, formerly at BASF SE, Ludwigshafen, Germany, and the University of Heidelberg, Germany, celebrates his 80th birthday on July 27, 2020. He is well-known for his work on drug design, molecular modeling, and quantitative structure–activity relationship (QSAR) models.

Hugo Kubinyi studied chemistry in Vienna, Austria. He received his Ph.D. from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich, Germany, in 1965. He then served as a postdoctoral researcher at the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) in Heidelberg. In 1966, he joined Knoll AG, Ludwigshafen, later a subsidiary of BASF AG (today BASF SE). In 1985, he moved to BASF AG. From 1987 until his retirement in 2001, he was responsible for the Molecular Modelling, X-ray Crystallography, and Drug Design group of BASF, and from 1998 on also for Combinatorial Chemistry in the Life Sciences. In 1986, he was appointed Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Heidelberg.

Among other honors, Kubinyi received the Literature Prize of the German Chemical Industry Fund (Fonds der Chemischen Industrie, FCI) for the book Wirkstoffdesign (Drug Design) in 1999, the Herman Skolnik Award from the Division of Chemical Information of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in 2006, and the Nauta Award in Pharmacochemistry from the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC) in 2008. He also is a IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry) Fellow. Among other commitments, Kubinyi served as Chair of the Cheminformatics and QSAR Society from 1995 to 2000 and as co-editor of the Wiley-VCH book series Methods and Principles in Medicinal Chemistry from 1996 to 2016.

Selected Publications

• Chemogenomics in Drug Discovery: A Medicinal Chemistry Perspective,
  H. Kubinyi, G. Müller, R. Mannhold, G. Folkers (Eds.),
  Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, 2006.
  ISBN: 978-3-527-60402-9
• QSAR/QSPR Modelling – Finding Rules in Noisy Data?,
  F. Darvas, O. Kappe, G. Schneider, M. Wiese, H. Kubinyi,
  QSAR Comb. Sci. 2006, 25, 811–812.
  https://doi.org/10.1002/qsar.200690026
• Wirkstoffdesign (in German),
  H.-J. Böhm, G. Klebe, H. Kubinyi,
  Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, 2002.
  ISBN: 978-3-827-41353-6
• A Scoring Scheme for Discriminating between Drugs and Nondrugs,
  J. Sadowski, H. Kubinyi,
  J. Med. Chem. 1998, 41, 3325–3329.
  https://doi.org/10.1021/jm9706776
• QSAR and 3D QSAR in drug design Part 1: methodology,
  H. Kubinyi,
  Drug Discovery Today 1997, 2, 457–467.
  https://doi.org/10.1016/S1359-6446(97)01079-9
• Variable Selection in QSAR Studies. I. An Evolutionary Algorithm,
  Hxugo Kubiny,
  QSAR Comb. Sci. 1994, 13, 285–294.
  https://doi.org/10.1002/qsar.19940130306
• QSAR: Hansch Analysis and Related Approaches,
  H. Kubinyi,
  VCH Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Weinheim, 1993.
  ISBN: 978-3-527-30035-8
• Partial Synthesis of Some Cocarcinogens from Croton Oil,
  E. Hecker, H. Kubinyi, H. U. Schairer, Ch. v. Szczepanski, H. Bresch,
  Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. 1965, 4, 1072–1073.
  https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.196510723