Alexander Hillisch

Alexander Hillisch is a Vice President and Head of Computational Molecular Design at Bayer AG, Wuppertal, Germany. His team supports small molecule and biologics drug discovery in cardiology with computational chemistry, chemoinformatics, machine learning, in silico ADMET and structural bioinformatics techniques.
From 1998 to 2003 he headed a research group at EnTec GmbH, Jena, Germany, a subsidiary of Schering AG, Berlin. There he was project manager in preclinical research and involved in the computer-aided design and pharmacological characterization of drugs against gynecological diseases and cancer.
He conducted his Ph.D. thesis at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMB), Jena in the area of biophysics (NMR, FRET) and molecular modeling. Alexander Hillisch received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry with Prof. Peter Schuster in 1998 and his diploma in Pharmacy in 1995 from the University of Vienna, Austria.
He is co-author of 44 research papers, 2 books and 62 pharmaceutical compound patents which led to 6 clinical development candidates. Alexander teaches “Molecular pharmacology and Drug Design” at the University of Cologne from which he received a honorary professorship in 2010.

Andrea Pierleoni

Andrea Pierleoni is Head of Artificial Intelligence at Healx a next-generation biotech using the latest advancements in AI to discover life-changing treatments for rare disease patients.
Andrea has 15 years experience in applying machine learning techniques on biomedical big data to deliver novel solutions for drug discovery both in academia and industry. Before joining Healx he played a key role in the development of the Open Targets Platform, a precompetitive target discovery effort between several large Pharma companies and leading academic institutions.
Andrea has a degree in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology and a PhD in Computational Biology from the University of Bologna.

Andreas Bender

Dr Andreas Bender is a Reader for Molecular Informatics with the Centre for Molecular Science Informatics at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Cambridge, leading a group of about 22 postdocs, PhD and graduate students and academic visitors. In his work, Andreas is involved with the integration and analysis of chemical and biological data, aimed at understanding phenotypic compound action (such as cellular readouts, and also organism-level effects) on a mechanistic level, predicting molecular properties related to both compound effiacy and toxicity, as well as drug repurposing. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and worked in the Lead Discovery Informatics group at Novartis in Cambridge/MA as well as at Leiden University in the Netherlands before his current post. In 2013 he was awarded an ERC Starting Grant to model mixture effects of chemical structures in biological systems using mechanistic approaches, an area currently very little understood.

Andrew Leach

Andrew's initial research was in the field of computational chemistry at Oxford University, UCSF and the University of Southampton. In 1994 he joined GlaxoSmithKline where over the next >20 years he was involved in the development and application of new platform capabilities for drug discovery in areas including computational chemistry and cheminformatics, fragment-based drug discovery, cardiovascular safety, proteomics and biological mass spectrometry. He also contributed to multiple therapeutic projects and led GSK’s early Discovery portfolios against protease, ion channel and epigenetic targets. He is currently Head of Chemistry Services at the European Bioinformatics Institute where his responsibilities include the EBI’s chemogenomics resources (ChEMBL, SureChEMBL), other biologically relevant small molecules and metabolomics.

Benjamin Tehan

Benjamin Tehan completed his PhD in Computational/Medicinal Chemistry at MIPS (Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences) in 2003, which included a sabbatical in Cambridge at Celltech Pharmaceuticals where, as part of his PhD, Ben first worked on machine learning and deep learning methodologies applied to common pharmaceutical problems. Benjamin then spent almost the next 7 years as part of the 7TM group within the computational chemistry department of GlaxoSmithKline, Harlow, primarily supporting the Pain and Neuroscience CEDDs. In 2009 Benjamin left GSK and moved to Heptares Therapeutics, to continue his love affair with G protein-coupled receptors. During his time at Sosei Heptares Benjamin established and led the Cheminformatics Department. In 2019 Benjamin left Sosei Heptares to head up the Computational Chemistry department of OMass Technologies where he currently overseas all aspects from machine learning to structure & ligand-based drug design.

Bilal Nizami

Bilal Nizami received his PhD in 2017 from UKZN, Durban, South Africa. His PhD studies were focused on molecular modeling of Non-Nucleotide Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitors (NNRTIs). After this Bilal worked as postdoctoral researcher in Rhodes University (South Africa), and Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Budapest), where he mainly worked on database development and programming. He has interest is in wide areas such as computational chemistry, cheminformatics, bioinformatics, machine learning, data science, and molecular modelling etc.

Bryn Williams-Jones

Bryn spent nearly 20 years at Pfizer in a number of different roles in multiple therapeutic areas, where he lead data-driven exploratory target hypothesis generation for provision of impactful insights to early drug discovery target identification. Bryn championed a pre-competitive and collaborative approach to using data in early drug discovery, including working with researchers from multiple different drug companies to build a better understanding in the wider scientific community of the unique needs of using data for drug discovery research.

Bryn is Director of Exploratory Research at BenevolentAI, a leading AI company developing and applying advanced technologies to accelerate the journey from data to medicine. He is responsible for building and progressing a broad portfolio of new drug programmes in multiple disease ares through the application of BenevolentAI’s tech tools and platforms. In addition, Bryn is a founder and CEO of the Open PHACTS Foundation, which began as an Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) project.

Chris De Graaf

Dr. Chris de Graaf is Head of Computational Chemistry at Sosei Heptares, an international biopharmaceutical group focused on the design and development of new medicines originating from its proprietary GPCR-targeted StaR® technology and Structure-Based Drug Design platform capabilities (www.soseiheptares.com). In this role Chris is leading the development and application of structural cheminformatics and computer-assisted drug design approaches across the GPCRome to help Sosei Heptares advance a broad and deep pipeline of partnered and in-house drug candidates in multiple therapeutic areas including neurology, immuno-oncology, gastroenterology, inflammation and rare/specialty diseases.

Christian Tyrchan

Christian received his PhD in Chemistry from the Department of Biochemistry in Cologne, with specialization in Pharmacology and Biochemistry. After joining AstraZeneca, he held different computational chemistry roles, contributing to drug discovery projects and building chemoinformatic as machine learning capabilities across the company. He is currently leading the Early RIA Computational Chemistry team and has a keen interest in the application of computational methods and chemoinformatics to drug development.

Clayton Rabideau

Darren Green

Darren Green is Director of Molecular Design and Senior Fellow, GlaxoSmithKline. Based at Stevenage, his group specialises in the application of molecular design, machine learning, predictive modelling and chemoinformatics methods to drug discovery. Darren also leads the Compound Collection Enhancement strategy for GSK.
Darren has a PhD in Theoretical Chemistry from the University of Manchester. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and chair of the Advisory Board for the Hartree Centre, the UK national laboratory for high performance computing, simulation and cognitive science.

Florian Mrugalla

After my M.Sc. in chemical biology I obtained my Ph.D in computational chemistry in the group of Prof. Dr. Stefan M. Kast, working on novel statistical mechanics and machine-learning based methods to describe protein-ligand interactions (until 2017).
I followed up on this with a post-doctoral position at Bayer where I worked in the interdisciplinary project: AI4Synthesis. Here, I was mainly involved in the development of machine-learning based models to predict the outcome of chemical reactions and the implementation and development of a retrosynthesis tool within Bayer (2018-2019).
Beginning from 2020 I will be a “scientist industrial mathematics” in the Applied Mathematics group within Bayer.
 

Friedemann Schmidt

Friedemann Schmidt received his Ph.D. in 2001 for Physical and Computational Chemistry from the
Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany. In 2001 he started his career as Research Scientist in Chemoinformatics at Aventis Pharma. Since 2004 he held different positions of increasing responsibility at Sanofi R&D, in Computer-Aided Drug Design and recently in Preclinical Safety. In 2015 he was appointed Head of Computational and Systems Toxicology at Sanofi.
Throughout his career he put his focus on predictive computational methods, namely in the field of toxicology. He has been authoring numerous articles and chapters and has been leading technology and discovery teams in the fields of diabetes, osteoarthritis, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.

Friedrich Rippmann

Friedrich Rippmann is Director of Computational Chemistry & Biology at Merck in Darmstadt, Germany. Previously he was head of Bio- and Chemoinformatics at Merck, with responsibility for groups in Germany, France and Switzerland. He was also responsible for the set-up of bioinformatics and protein crystallography in Darmstadt.
In his academic career he worked at the National Institute for Medical Research, MRC London, and at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, Germany.
Several major software developments originated in his group, among them RELIBASE, a comprehensive database of protein-ligand complexes; and more recently DoGSite Scorer, a druggability prediction server; TRAPP, a webtool for analysis of transient binding pockets in proteins; and a panel of methods for selective kinase inhibitor generation. Currently he is working on digitizing many aspects of the early discovery research, including the integration into coherent workflows. Machine Learning, especially Deep Learning, and other aspects of Artificial Intelligence are central to this. Two recent press releases highlight his commitment to making latest AI technologies available to Merck’s drug discovery process.

Gerhard Hessler

Dr. Gerhard Hessler is head of Synthetic Molecular Design at Sanofi in Frankfurt. He is responsible for a team of medicinal chemists, computer-based drug design, structural biology and data management. Before, he headed teams in computer-aided drug design and structural biology since 2008. He joined Aventis in 2001 as a computational chemist, after working for four years in the computational chemistry group of the Central Research at Bayer AG.
Dr. Gerhard Hessler did his Ph.D. at Technical University of Munich in NMR-based conformational analysis of biologically active peptides and oligonucleotides. During his industrial career the main focus of his work is the application of ligand- and structure-based design techniques to the development of drugs.

Govinda Bhisetti

Govinda Bhisetti is a Principal Investigator and Head of Computational Chemistry department at Biogen since 2014. Previously, he worked at Vertex Pharmaceuticals for 22+ years where he led drug design efforts on several drug discovery projects. His research at Vertex led to the discovery of three FDA approved drugs: Agenerase, Lexiva and Incivek. He is a co-inventor of these drugs and named inventor on 26 patents. He has also published 72 research papers including review articles and book chapters. His current activities include application of state of the art computational methods in the discovery of novel drugs for CNS diseases.

Graham Smith

Graham F. Smith, PhD CChem FRSC, is currently team leader of computational safety and DMPK, Drug Safety and Metabolism, AstraZeneca, Cambridge, UK. He is active scientifically in the areas of chemical toxicology, DMPK, AI, small molecule lead discovery, chemical technologies and medicinal chemistry. His previous roles were as director medicinal chemistry at Merck in Boston, head of chemical technologies at Pfizer in Sandwich and as a senior scientist at Sanofi, London. He graduated from the University of Nottingham with BSc and Ph.D. with Prof. Gerry Pattenden and completed post-doctoral studies at the Ohio State University with Prof. Leo Paquette.

John Overington

John studied Chemistry and then completed a PhD in protein modelling and sequence-structure relationships, he then joined Pfizer,leading the Molecular Informatics Structure and Design department. This was followed by Inpharmatica, where he led the development of a series of computational and data platforms to improve drug discovery. In 2008 John was central to the transfer of this technology to the EMBL-EBI, as the ChEMBL database. John then joined Artificial Intelligence technology company - Stratified Medical (later renamed BenevolentAI), applying machine learning to the development of biomedical data extraction and integration strategies. In 2017 John joined the Medicine Discovery Catapult as CIO, where he leads the development and application of informatics approaches to promote and support application of informatics to drug discovery.

Jonathan Mason

Dr Jonathan S Mason is a Senior Research Fellow at Sosei Heptares for GPCR structure-based drug design and a Scientific Advisor to several innovative biotech companies (US, UK, Japan). He has four decades years of global pharmaceutical drug discovery experience and is an experienced leader and scientific expert for drug design technologies (computational medicinal chemistry / CADD, structural biology, in silico ADME/tox etc). He previously led teams involving computational chemistry and structural biology/chemistry at Lundbeck (Denmark, Divisional Director), Pfizer (UK, Executive Director MISD), Bristol-Myers Squibb (US, Director Structural Biology & Modeling) and Rhône-Poulenc Rorer (now Sanofi) in the UK, France and USA, including an initial 5 years as a medicinal chemist. He completed his PhD at Queen Mary, U. London and become an early pioneer of the use of computational chemistry / CADD approaches in drug discovery research. More recent focus includes enhancing computer-assisted drug design with full binding site water networks and their energetics for potency, selectivity and kinetics and the prediction of binding affinity (FEP).

Jonny Wray

Jonny Wray is Head of Discovery Informatics at e-therapeutics where he has been responsible for the conceptual development of their network driven drug discovery approach, and the design and implementation of the software platform embodying that approach. Jonny has over 30 years’ experience in developing and applying computational approaches to complex biological problems, both in academia and the drug discovery industry.

Phil Cox

Quentin Perron

Quentin Perron is a medicinal chemist by training. He holds a PhD in organometallic chemistry from
the University of Geneva. As a postdoc at UCLA he worked on the total synthesis of
Brasillicardin A, a complex natural product having a potent immunosuppressive activity.
After working as medicinal chemist at Laboratoires Servier, he switched to data
science and chemoinformatics at Quinten, a company specialized in data science services. In 2016,
with his business partners Yann Gaston-Mathé and Nicolas Do Huu, he co-founded Iktos, a start-up
company developing AI technologies for new drug design. He is now the CSO of the company.
 

Robert Young

Rob Young joined Wellcome on Valentine’s day 1990, after completing his undergraduate and D.Phil studies at University of Oxford and Post Doc at Ben May Institute, University of Chicago. His industrial career navigated many changes, mergers and acquisitions, charting significant contributions to six development candidates before moving to early stage discovery.
Productive partnership with Alan Hill (Physical Properties) culminated in the establishment of Chrom logD and PFI as GSK standards. Author/inventor on approaching 100 publications/ patent applications and visiting Professor, University of St Andrews.
Rob took early retirement from GSK in July 2019 and set up Blue Burgundy Consulting.

Stephen Pickett

Dr Stephen Pickett is a Scientific Director within the Computational Sciences department, based in Stevenage. He has a degree and PhD in Chemistry and over 25 years’ experience in computational chemistry and cheminformatics applied to drug discovery at Rhone Poulenc, Roche and GSK. Since joining GSK in 2001 he has been involved in a number of initiatives including screening collection design, HTS data analysis, compound attrition, fragment based drug discovery and, most recently, has been developing the science and platforms for automated molecule generation and design. He is an author of over 50 peer-reviewed scientific articles and is a named author on six patent applications. In 2016 he was elected a GSK Fellow.

Thomas Steinbrecher

Thomas Steinbrecher studied Chemistry at the University of Freiburg in Germany and earned a diploma with distinction in Physical Chemistry. He completed a Ph.D. thesis on “Computer Simulations of Protein-Ligand Interactions” in 2005. He joined the developer team of the Amber MD package as a Postdoc at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego and Rutgers University in New Jersey. The work focus was on efficient free energy calculation methods and QM/MM simulations of charge transfer. After returning to Germany in 2008, Thomas established a junior research group at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, working on fast electron transfer phenomena in DNA and proteins. He joined Schrodinger in 2013 where he is responsible for the large scale application of free energy calculation methods in pharmaceutical drug design. He currently heads the Applications Science Department for Europe.

Vishal Sahni

Vishal is a Director of Discovery Research and a member of the global Neuroscience R&D Leadership Team at MSD where his group is focussed on developing treatments for age-related diseases. He has a keen interest in catalysing insights from human genetics to develop novel drugs for stratified patient populations and in applying machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches to drug discovery and development. Over the last 10 years, Vishal led teams at several stages of the drug discovery, development and commercialisation value chain, initially at Eisai and subsequently at GSK, working across Europe, the United States and Asia to support the development of small molecule-, biologics- and gene therapy-medicines.

Vishal holds a PhD in Developmental Neurobiology from University College London, a Master’s degree in Experimental Neuroscience from Imperial College London and a Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Science from King’s College London.
 

Willem Van Hoorn

Willem van Hoorn gained an MEng in chemical engineering and a PhD in computational chemistry at the University of Twente, the Netherlands followed by a postdoc at Yale with Bill Jorgensen. He subsequently spent a decade at Pfizer Sandwich focusing on computational techniques for HTS triage and combinatorial library design. This was followed by a position as an IT consultant at Accelrys (now Biovia) assisting a range of clients from small biotech to big pharma. Since 2013 he is pursuing his long term interest of applying computer algorithms to drug discovery at Exscientia.