Dear Prof. Shoichet & Klebe,

I am reaching out to ask for your help in identifying exceptional candidates for open CADD positions at Forma Therapeutics (http://formatherapeutics.com/) in the Boston area & making you aware that we would consider highly recommended post-docs in your labs.

I made your acquaintance all the way back in 2002 at the Erice Gene-to-drugs xray crystallography conference and we have encountered each other on numerous occasions like the CADD GRC. Furthermore, I have been following your published work with much interest. Your laboratories produce very important results and insights that I attempt to apply & adapt to my own work, particularly here at Forma, where I have the privilege of leading a growing CompChem group (with 5 current members).

We are mostly interested in candidates who have demonstrated small molecule drug discovery experience, a very sound understanding of medicinal chemistry and how to work with medchemists. Furthermore, good organic chemistry & biophysical chemistry are more important than method development, chemoinformatics, ….

Forma is an oncology-focused relatively young (~5 years) and small (~110 people) company located in Watertown, MA.

We are interested in many molecular target classes relevant to cancer biology, including cancer metabolism, epigenetics, protein-protein interactions and protein homeostasis to name a few.

Computational chemistry is an integral part of our discovery paradigm; we generally only work on structure-enabled targets. Every project team includes a compchemists, who is invested as much as medicinal chemists, biologist and biochemists. In general, we follow two strategies in parallel: lead identification and chemical biology - in essence finding a tool compound for target validation. The hope is to push interesting chemical matter as far as we can toward pre-clinical development.

This is a brief & simplified introduction to Forma and I hope that it convinces you that Forma is an exciting place to do drug discovery.

I hope that you can provide interesting candidate leads for me to follow up.

Any assistance that you can extend is deeply appreciated.

Best regards,

Torsten Herbertz, PhD

Principal Scientist

Forma Therapeutics, Inc.

500 Arsenal Street, Suite 100

Watertown, MA 02472

Email: therbertz@formatherapeutics.com

Office: +1-857-209-2327

www.formatherapeutics.com