Nouri Neamati really wanted to become a physician. Soon after paramedic training, however, he realized he can't stand the sight of blood. “I saw one surgery and that was it.”

Fortunately, the award-winning associate professor at the USC School of Pharmacy discovered another way to have "enormous impact" on patients: developing the drugs that treat disease instead.

Today Neamati's laboratory at the USC School of Pharmacy is one of the leaders in the world in drug design. He is the world’s foremost expert on the search for drugs targeted to the HIV-1 (human immunodeficiency virus) integrase protein. His work on cancer treatments focuses on creating drugs that can be taken orally, and he has won prestigious awards from the Department of Defense, the American Lung Association and the Susan Komen Breast Cancer Association, among others.

Neamati is excited about working on "the frontier of drug discovery." Using databases of information about hundreds of proteins involved in disease and thousands of pharmaceutical compounds, Neamati tries to find a match. "We're trying to find the signatures for compounds that can inhibit each of these particular proteins. It's a detective game within pharmaceutical space."

His lab already identified a series of small-molecule agents with remarkable potency against various human cancer cell lines, including lung cancer and ovarian cancer cells. And to promote drug discovery worldwide, he's launched a new scientific journal called Current Molecular Pharmacology.

It's all part of the promise he made to himself as a student working at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas. "We shared the same cafeteria with the patients. Every day for 10 years I would see kids and adults with cancer and say 'I need to do something about this.'" Bloodlessly of course.