He is Scientific Advisor and Group Leader, Computational Chemistry and Cheminformatics, in the Drug Discovery group at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) and Assistant Professor (Status) at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Toronto.

Poda has a MSc in Molecular and Chemical Physics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and a PhD in Bioorganic Chemistry from the Institute for Bioorganic and Petrochemistry, National Academy of Sciences in Kiev, Ukraine. During his work at Pharmacia & Upjohn, Pfizer and now at OICR, he has demonstrated excellence in computer-aided drug design covering all aspects of modern computational drug discovery: structure-, ligand- and fragment-based drug discovery, cheminformatics, medicinal chemistry, data mining and analysis, physical and ADMET property prediction, methods development, and programming. He has made major contributions to late-stage pre-clinical discovery of drug leads in multiple therapeutic areas including disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs), antithrombotics, CNS analgesics, inhaled chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), COVID-19 and anti-cancer agents.

At OICR, Poda helped develop small molecule drug candidates for the treatment of haematological cancers that attracted major investments and partnership from Johnson & Johnson Innovation (C$450 million), Triphase Accelerator, and Celgene/Bristol Myers Squibb (US$1 billion). Most recently, Poda and his team received funding from the Ontario government’s COVID-19 Rapid Research Fund to identify new therapeutics and existing drugs that could be repurposed to treat COVID-19.

He is author and co-author of over 65 publications in peer-reviewed journals, 3 book chapters and 13 patents. He was recently a recipient of the OICR Extra Mile Award and three Innovative Spirit Awards in recognition of his structure-based and cheminformatics support of several on-going projects within OICR’s Drug Discovery Program.