Our expert team is drawn from leading specialists in the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries. We bring a unique blend of expertise in medicinal and computational therapeutics alongside a trackrecord in emerging innovation leadership
Meet our Team
Dr. Alan D. Roth
Chief Executive Officer
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 charge of global equity bio-investments as well as overall industrial investment research.
He co-founded, took public in the US and was first CEO and CFO of Chiral Quest, Inc., a life sciences company in the area of chiral pharmaceuticals. At the University of Oxford he was awarded the Royal Society Entrepreneur in Residence and is a Visiting Lecturer in the area of science entrepreneurship. Alan earned his BA (Hons) from Cornell University, PhD from Columbia University, and Postdoctoral Fellowship in from the University of Oxford in medicinal chemistry.
Dr. Paul Finn
Chief Scientific Officer
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
Head of Biology
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. As cofounder and CSO of Novacta Biosystems he led the development of the drug NVB302 from concept to clinic.
Subsequently as CEO of Cantab he led the discovery of the next generation polymyxin, currently undergoing clinical development as SPR206.
Mike obtained his B. A. in biochemistry 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
Head of ML & Methods Development
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
Sr. Computational Chemist
Dr. Grace Edmund
Grace leads the computational chemistry effort for our tRNA synthetase program, the most advanced of our validation discovery projects. She also manages the logistics and coordinates assays in our critical path between our scientists and external collaborators networks. 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.
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Dr. Aras Asaad
Mathematician
Dr. Aras Asaad
Aras is developing Oxford Drug Design’s topological data analysis (TDA) pipeline to build topological fingerprints from molecules. The work mainly involves using algebraic topology methods to design novel therapeutic agents in oncology and other diseases. 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 work 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
Computational Chemist
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 Innovation Programme.
Dr. Anthony J. Chubb
Computational Biologist
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).
Meet our Board of Directors
Prof. W. Graham Richards CBE FRS
Chairman
Prof. W. Graham Richards CBE FRS
Graham is one of the pioneers of computational chemistry and molecular design, particularly for pharmaceutical applications. Over 40 years at the University of Oxford Chemistry Department, he introduced many of the techniques now routinely used in computer-aided drug design both in industry and academia. Graham’s influential paper Third age of quantum chemistry marked the development of computational techniques for theoretical analysis whose precision equaled or surpassed experimental results.
He was the scientific co-founder of Oxford Molecular, an Oxford spinout company that produced software for modelling of small molecules and proteins which went public in the London Stock Exchange and it is today part of Biovia. Graham was responsible for the creation of IP Group Plc whose first spin-out from the Oxford Chemistry Department was Oxford Nanopore Tech. Graham received his B.A. and D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. He was awarded a CBE and has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Sunil Shah
NED
Sunil Shah
Sunil is a serial entrepreneur having begun a career in the Life Sciences team at PA Consulting group followed by co-founding two companies in the information technology and life sciences sector. The second of these companies, Oxygen Healthcare Ltd was acquired by Piramal Enterprises Ltd (BSE: PEL). Sunil co-founded O2h Ventures which involves seeding drug discovery, academic in-licensing and biotechnology incubation. Sunil has a degree in Biochemistry and an MBA from Cambridge University.
Robert G. Boyle
NED
Robert G. Boyle
Robert is a founder and the CEO of Sentinel Oncology Ltd, a company dedicated towards the discovery of novel small molecules for the treatment of cancer. He is a medicinal chemist by background with over twenty-five years’ industrial experience. He has held positions at Pfizer (1993-1997); Cambridge Discovery Chemistry (1997-2000); Millennium Pharmaceuticals (200-2003); Astex Therapeutics (2003-2005) & Sentinel Oncology (2005-present).
As CEO & founder of Sentinel Oncology, he has successfully raised multiple rounds of funding, built a pipeline of small molecule drug assets and secured multiple licensing deals with Biotech and Pharma. Sentinel has been the recipient of numerous awards & grants for innovation and Robert is a named inventor on over 50 patents & publications describing the discovery and use of small molecules for the treatment of unmet medical needs
Dr. Michael Murphy
Observer
Dr. Michael Murphy
Mike is the Portfolio Manager of Meltwind Advisory LLP, a company founded by Jonathan Milner to help manage investments in early stage healthcare and biotech companies. Jonathan was the Founder of Abcam plc, is an experienced entrepreneur and investor and is passionate about supporting UK life science and high-tech start-ups. He has provided considerable investment and support to over 60 companies and has assisted three technology companies to IPO on the London AIM Stock exchange.
Mike has worked for Cambridge startup companies in engineering, computer science and biotechnology, engaged in technical, operational and business development roles. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Cambridge University
Scientific Advisory Board
Prof. Xiang-Lei Yang
Prof. Xiang-Lei Yang
Xiang-Lei Yang, PhD, is the Ernest W. Hahn Endowed Chair and a professor in the Department of Molecular Medicine at Scripps Research. Her lab pioneers the field of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases regarding their broad regulatory functions in higher organisms and in the context of human diseases, including neuromuscular diseases and cancers.
The Yang lab uncovered diverse non-enzymatic functions of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases that regulate the vasculature, stress responses, and proteostasis, and demonstrated their pathophysiological significance. Her lab also deployed state-of-the art structural biology to elucidate the molecular basis of these functions and of their disease-causing dysregulations. Furthermore, Prof. Yang’s work showed that the tRNA synthetase function is sensitive to the environment and can connect the environmental change to gene expression regulation, thus playing a key role in maintaining cellular homeostasis.
Beyond these discoveries, her lab has also expanded our understanding of tRNAs themselves, which are co-deployed in some of these mechanisms.
The author or co-author of over 100 scientific publications and patents, she founded the Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on “Translation Machinery in Health and Disease”, the first disease-focused conference for the broad field of mRNA translation. She is a scientific co-founder aTyr Pharma, which is aimed at developing tRNA synthetase-related molecules as therapeutic biologics.
Dr. Yang received her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering at Capital Institute of Medical Science (Beijing), and her Ph.D. in Biophysics and Computational Biology from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Sarah Blagden
Sarah Blagden
Professor Sarah Blagden is a clinician-scientist and Professor of Experimental Oncology at the University of Oxford. She has over 20 years of experience in clinical cancer drug development, initially as a phase I clinical trials fellow at the Royal Marsden Hospital/Institute of Cancer Research and subsequently in setting up and running the Phase I trials portfolio at Imperial College London.
Latterly, Prof. Blagden directed Oxford’s Early Phase Trials Unit) and is now Director of Oxford’s Oncology Cancer Trials Office (OCTO) which recently joined the CRUK trials network as the UK’s first dedicated centre for conducting Precision-Prevention and Early Detection trials.
From her clinical background as a Medical Oncologist, Prof. Blagden has worked extensively with pharma and biotech partners to design and conduct trials of novel anti-cancer treatments for patients with ovarian and other cancers. She was Oxford’s Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre (ECMC) lead and acting head of strategy for ECMC and is now involved in supporting UK-wide early phase trials activity.
Prof. Blagden has contributed to approximately 100 peer review publications, many exploring trial methodologies, including a consensus paper on Conducting Complex Innovative Trials. She runs a research lab exploring post-transcriptional gene dysregulation in cancer and was the first to clone the human RNA binding protein LARP1 and describe it’s function in cancer. Prof. Blagden co-founded LARP Society in 2010 to support young scientists working in this field and is the founder of RNA Guardian Ltd, a biomarker discovery company. She received a BSc in pharmacology in and her medical degree (MBBS) from the University of London.
Dr. James B. Kahn
Dr James B. Kahn
Dr. Kahn is a specialist physician with extensive expertise in policy modelling in health care, cost-effectiveness analysis, and evidence-based medicine. He had an extensive career at Johnson and Johnson where he was responsible for the development of levofloxacin and ofloxacin at their Ortho-McNeil affiliate
He is an active member of national and international Infectious Diseases societies, including ASM,IDSA, ISID, and ESCMID. Dr. Kahn served two years as an EIS Officer at the US Center for Disease Control (CDC). He earned a B.A. from Harvard University and M.D. from Harvard Medical School. He the founder and principal of JBK Strategic Consultations, LLC, specialising in infectious disease expertise to the pharmaceutical industry. He has authored/co-authored almost 140 peer-reviewed scientific papers and presentations in the area.