Director 

Richard is a medicinal chemist with over 20 years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry. His wide expertise spans numerous therapeutic areas and target classes, with an extensive knowledge of preclinical drug discovery processes and techniques – from hit-to-lead, to lead-optimisation and candidate selection. Richard has contributed to several programmes which have seen small molecules enter the clinic and has excellent synthetic chemistry capability, demonstrating many examples of efficiency savings through judicious route design. Richard also maintains specialist expertise in integrin drug discovery and is a lead author on a recent Nature Reviews Drug Discovery article. He has co-organised several inaugural RSC medicinal chemistry conferences on Fibrosis and on Integrins. He is an honorary lecturer in medicinal chemistry and pharmaceutical science at several UK universities and is an author on ~30 papers/book chapters/patents. He also has additional interests in bibliometric analyses in medicinal chemistry (see recent publications).

Director 

Simon has over 30 years’ experience at GSK in drug discovery across many therapeutic areas and routes of delivery with a track record for innovation and working cross-discipline and cross-institutions. He has significant expertise in delivering clinical candidates, managing collaborations and in organising and teaching undergraduate courses.

As a Director in Medicinal Chemistry in the Fibrosis Discovery Performance Unit at GSK, Simon led the drug discovery team that delivered multiple integrin clinical candidates. He was one of the most published medicinal chemists in GSK worldwide with over 100 publications including 34 patents (h-index of 30). With a long track record of collaboration, he was the GSK lead for the successful 2019 £12.8m EPSRC Prosperity Partnership grant with the Universities of Nottingham and Strathclyde.

His most recent publications describe integrin drug discovery including high impact factor reviews. He is also co-author on a series of highly cited papers about aromatic ring count developability in drug discovery. For the past nine years, Simon has been a visiting professor at the University of Nottingham where he co-led bespoke undergraduate teaching modules in live drug discovery programmes and was co-awarded the Lord Dearing Prize for teaching in 2017.