Dr. Alan D. Roth

Alan’s career in life sciences comprises basic research, investment management/capital markets, strategic consultancy and emerging company operations. Starting his career as a chemist at Merck & Co., Inc. in New Lead Discovery, after his academic work he joined McKinsey serving leading companies in a variety of industries. He subsequently became Director at Commerzbank Asset Management ($140bn AUM) in London and Frankfurt in charge of global equity bio-investments as well as overall industrial investment research. He co-founded, took public and was first CEO and CFO of Chiral Quest, Inc., a life sciences company in the area of chiral pharmaceuticals. Alan earned his BA (Hons) from Cornell University, PhD from Columbia University, and Postdoctoral Fellowship in from the University of Oxford in organic chemistry. He also serves as Director in Fitzroy Partners in London developing new health sciences ventures internationally. At the University of Oxford, he is Royal Society Entrepreneur in Residence and Visiting Lecturer in the area of science entrepreneurship.

Dr. Paul Finn

Paul has been leading scientific progress at Oxford Drug Design after an extensive career at Pfizer, Smithkline Beecham (GSK) and TopoTarget. His expertise extends over drug discovery and early pharmaceutical development. At TopoTarget, where he was Director of R&D, Paul led the preclinical development Beleodaq®, of which he is also an inventor, used to treat patients with peripheral T-cell lymphoma.

At Oxford Drug Design he has led our computational drug discovery platform as well as our drug discovery efforts and has been instrumental in the raising of c. £10M of non-dilutive finance internationally. Paul studied biochemistry at the University of Oxford and obtained his PhD at the University of Manchester. He is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham School of Computer Science, working at the interface of drug discovery and machine learning.

Dr. Mike Dawson

Mike has led natural product chemistry and biotransformation programmes contributing to the development of important drugs such as Epivir, Zanamavir and Abacavir. He spent the first 20 years of his career with GSK and legacy companies and subsequently was involved in the founding and leadership of two biotech companies in the antibacterial space. As cofounder and CSO of Novacta Biosystems he led the development of the anti-C. difficile drug NVB302 from concept to clinic.

Subsequently as CEO of Cantab Anti-infectives he led the discovery of the next generation polymyxin, currently undergoing clinical development as SPR206. He joined Oxford Drug Design in 2019. Mike has a first degree from the University of Cambridge and a PhD from the University of Leicester. He is an author of over 65 peer-reviewed papers and an inventor of over 20 patent families.

Dr. Richard Cooper

Richard is a computational chemist with an extensive career in both industry and academia successfully applying modelling technologies towards molecular optimisation.

Starting his career as chemistry software specialist at Oxford Diffraction, he then led efforts in automation of structural model building and validation as R&D Manager at oXray. His leadership role continued as Software Architect at Inhibox - which engendered Oxford Drug Design- applying molecular fragment linking tools to drug discovery projects. Since 2010 he has been Head of Chemical Crystallography in the Department of Chemistry at Oxford University where his research has focused on method development for open source crystal structure modelling tools and combining chemical descriptors, machine learning models and experimental data to enable interpretation and tuning of properties in molecular materials.

He received his BA, MA and DPhil in chemistry from Oxford where he also conducted postdoctoral work and is currently appointed as Associate Professor. He serves as President of the British Crystallographic Association and Co-editor of the structural chemistry journal, Acta Cryst. Section C.

Dr. Grace Edmund

Grace leads the computational chemistry effort for our tRNA synthetase project, the most advanced of our anti-bacterial discovery projects. She also manages the logistics and coordinates assays in our critical path between our scientists and external collaborators. Prior to joining Oxford Drug Design in 2015, Grace completed post-doctoral research in the field of polymer modelling for DSTL.

Grace earned her MChem in Chemistry from Durham University and Ph. D in computational chemistry from the University of Surrey. Her masters research was in the field of ion channels in pain therapeutics and her doctoral work focused on modelling species variation in CYP450-mediated metabolism.

Dr. Aras Asaad

Aras is developing Oxford Drug Design’s topological data analysis pipeline to build topological fingerprints from molecules. The work mainly involves using algebraic topology methods to design novel anti-infectives and other therapeutic agents. He is also combining topological methods with machine learning approaches to enrich our pipeline of molecular featurisation methods. Aras obtained his MSc and D. Phil in mathematics both from The University of Buckingham in the area of applied topology. His doctoral thesis developed novel topology-based algorithms for various image analysis tasks such as fake face detection and biomedical image analysis. He was appointed Honorary Research Fellow by the School of Computing at The University of Buckingham.

Dr. Marco Albanese

Marco has been leading Oxford Drug Design’s histidine kinases inhibitors discovery program with a focus on tackling important pathogens. He employs structure- and ligand-based computational methods to optimise ligand interactions, biological activity and pharmacokinetic properties.

Marco earned his B.S. and M.Sc. in pharmaceutical chemistry and technology from the University of Salerno (Italy). In collaboration with the University of Eastern Finland, he completed his M.Sc. applying computational methods to anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer approaches and received his PhD in computational chemistry from the University of Buckingham. Marco joined Oxford Drug Design as part of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Horizon 2020 Innovation Programme.

Dr. Anthony J. Chubb

Ant has pioneered large-scale drug discovery efforts involving automated virtual screening protocols connecting genomes to robotic testing. Over a 20-year career his professional expertise has covered molecular & cellular biology, molecular modelling, cheminformatics and computational biology.

At the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland, working as a clinical pharmacologist, he was awarded the Synergy Award from RCSI aimed at enhancing drug discovery and subsequently at the University College Dublin as researcher and manager, he established of a global virtual HTS system aimed at finding novel disease targets.

Ant received his BSc and PhD in medical biochemistry from the University of Cape Town,  (South Africa) and an MSc (Leadership & Management) from the Royal College of Surgeons (Ireland). He earned a Certificate in Python Programming from Microsoft (USA).