Chemical Reaction

A woman wearing an FDU athletics T-shirt, hits reset with an outdoor jog.

Melissa Avery jogs near Avery Point Lighthouse in Groton, Conn. (Photo: Joe Buglewicz)

By Kenna Caprio

Melissa Avery, BS’17, MS’18 (Flor), is always reaching out to fellow scientists and chemists to forge new connections and learn from their work.

At FDU, she engaged with her professors beyond the classroom, leading to the opportunity to conduct her own research under former organic chemistry professor Edward Salaski.

Collaboration continues in her work today. At Pfizer, she says, “a lot of the biggest breakthroughs happen through team brainstorming. We need each individual person’s creativity and innovation. It’s not work that can be done in a silo or in isolation.”

Avery is a medicinal chemist, working to develop new drugs. “My coworker says he considers us to be ‘molecular architects,’ because we use chemistry to put these molecules together in just the right way.”

As the world grappled with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists in labs across the world sprang into action, getting to work on vaccines and treatments. At Pfizer, Avery joined an elite team.

“In March 2020, we started working on what would become Paxlovid. It was a time in the pandemic where nobody else was allowed on site besides those of us working on that program. It was a very rewarding and unique experience to work in a situation where you’re your own patient and so is the entire world.”

The team completed their first synthesis of Paxlovid in July 2020. “We were in the clinic by March 2021. We worked with great urgency to get compounds and molecules to the clinic faster to treat patients. We took very well-calculated risks and didn’t skip steps. A lot of the work happened on a parallel track instead of in sequence.”

Avery currently works in Pfizer’s internal medicine division, developing therapies that will target cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.

“Creativity and innovation help us not only solve hard problems, but also find solutions to problems we didn’t even know we had,” Avery says. “Science is a very creative process.”