Dennis C. Liotta

Who is Dennis C. Liotta?

Dennis Liotta is a Chemistry professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, United States.

Liotta's fields of research are organic synthesis and medicinal chemistry. Along with Dr. Raymond F. Schinazi and Dr. Woo-Baeg Choi of Emory, he discovered Emtricitabine which is a breakthrough HIV drug; the drug was sold to Royalty Pharma and Gilead Sciences in July 2005 for $525 million and it is marketed under the name Emtriva. Currently Emtriva is part of drugs used by 94% of HIV-positive patients in the United States. Liotta and Schinazi are also co-inventors of the HIV drug lamivudine.

Liotta obtained his PhD. degree at City University of New York and carried out postdoctoral research at Ohio State University after which he joined the Emory faculty in 1976. He was promoted to full professor in 1988 and currently holds the Samuel Candler Dobbs professorship at Emory. He is also the director of the Emory Institute for Drug Discovery. Earlier he has served as the chair of the chemistry department and Emory's vice-president for research. Liotta has published over 200 research publications and holds over 50 US patents. Currently he is also the Editor-In-Chief of the ACS journal Medicinal Chemistry Letters.