Dr. Christopher J. Wilds

Canada Research Chair in Biological Chemistry (Tier 2)
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Faculty of Arts and Science

cwilds@alcor.concordia.ca

Dr. Christopher J. Wilds was born and raised in Montreal. He completed his undergraduate science degree in Chemistry at Concordia and his doctoral degree in Organic Chemistry at McGill University. In 2003, Dr. Wilds returned to Concordia as a faculty member after working briefly as a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

The main research foci for Dr. Wilds are nucleic acid chemistry, as well as organic and medicinal chemistry with the intent of designing new drugs to treat human disease that meet the specific needs of individual sufferers.

Dr. Wilds has already been highly productive in his research career. He is the co-author of approximately thirty-five peer reviewed publications and has obtained funding from FQRNT, NSERC, and CFI (Canada Research Chairs Infrastructure Fund and Leaders Opportunity Fund) for his research program. In 2006, he was the recipient of a Petro-Canada Young Innovators Award and more recently a travel award from the Ichikizaki Fund for Young Chemists.

Some of his other notable achievements include:

• Discovering during his doctoral work that oligonucleotides containing the sugar 2'-fluoro-2'-deoxyribose, when hybridized to ribonucleic acid (RNA), can trigger RNase H-mediated degradation of the RNA to which they are targeted. This was a significant finding for the field of antisense oligonucleotide chemistry, which has applications in the treatment of various diseases.
• Winning the 1999 Carl Winkler Award from McGill's Chemistry department for best Ph.D. thesis of the year.
• Receiving a Postdoctoral Fellowship from NSERC in 2000.
• Seeing a discovery that he and his wife made during their doctoral studies result in a successful patent application put forth by their supervisor and by McGill, which in turn led to the establishment of a small biotech company called Anagenis.