Rate My Professor Thierry Langer

Thierry Langer is Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. and Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Vienna's Faculty of Life Sciences, where he has served since October 2013. He heads the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry within the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences. Langer obtained his MSc degree in Pharmacy in 1988 and his PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry in 1991, both from the University of Vienna. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France, under Prof. C.-G. Wermuth, he joined Leopold-Franzens-University of Innsbruck in 1992. There, he progressed to Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry in 1997, Head of the Institute of Pharmaceutical Chemistry in 1998, and Head of the Pharmaceutical Chemistry Department in 1999. In 2003, he co-founded Inte:Ligand GmbH, developing software for computer-aided molecular design, and served as CEO until 2008. From 2008 to 2013, he was CEO of Prestwick Chemical, Inc. in Strasbourg, France, leading several drug discovery programs to preclinical and clinical development stages.

Langer's research focuses on computer-aided molecular design, encompassing pharmacophore modeling for parallel in silico screening and drug discovery, software for computer-assisted ligand design, virtual 3D molecular library generation and screening, and 3D-QSAR methods such as CoMFA and CoMSIA. His contributions span medicinal chemistry, cheminformatics, protein-ligand interactions, virtual screening, quantum mechanical methods for ligand binding, neurotoxicity prediction in drug discovery, and personalized medicine via volatile metabolites. He has authored over 237 publications, including recent works such as 'AutoPocket2CREST: Automating Binding Pocket Extraction for the CREST Conformer Generation Pipeline' (Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, 2026), 'PharmacoMatch: Efficient 3D Pharmacophore Screening via Neural Subgraph Matching' (ICLR, 2025), 'GRADE and X-GRADE: Unveiling Novel Protein–Ligand Interaction Fingerprints Based on GRAIL Scores' (Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, 2025), and 'Towards the Use of Metabolic Volatiles in Breath for Determining Drug Response: Gstachamine as an Unlabeled Substrate to Measure CYP3A4 Activity' (ChemMedChem, 2025). Langer's dual academic and industry experience has advanced computational approaches in pharmaceutical development.