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Dr Janet Brownlees is a Senior Director of Neuroscience Biology at the Merck Sharpe and Dohme Discovery Research Centre in London leading a team of biologists working on various mechanisms of neurodegeneration.

Janet has many years of experience in neuroscience research both in academia and drug discovery in industry previously working at GSK and LifeArc. She is an experienced Team Leader and Project Leader in neurodegeneration, pain and oncology from target identification and validation, lead optimisation to candidate selection.  She has led many academic, charity and biotech collaborations including the Dementia Consortium with Alzheimer’s Research U.K.  which involved teams of academic researchers and Pharma partners and was the Neuroscience lead at LifeArc. 

Janet completed a BSc (Hons) in Biochemistry at Queen’s University followed by a PhD in peptidase activity of the endothelia cells of the blood brain barrier.  Her post-doctoral positions at King’s College London focussed on neurofilament and mitochondria dynamics, axonal transport and tau phosphorylation.  Throughout her career she has published many papers and reviews. Janet is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and currently serves on the Grant Review Board and for Alzheimer’s Research UK and the Biomedical Research Advisory Panel of the Motor Neurone Disease Association.

Dr. Jeremy Burrows is VP, Head of Drug Discovery at Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV).  He heads up the Discovery team at MMV and works with Pharmaceutical companies, Universities and other institutions to delivery new candidate drugs for antimalarial therapy, anti-relapse, prophylaxis and transmission blocking. 
Jeremy obtained a MA in chemistry and a D.Phil. in synthetic organic chemistry at Oxford University (1989-1996).   In 1997 he joined ZENECA/ AstraZeneca as a medicinal chemist working in Infection, Cardiovascular and Inflammation research at Alderley Park in the UK.  In 2005 he was seconded to Södertälje, Sweden in CNS/Pain where he led a section focused on Alzheimer’s disease.  In 2008, he joined MMV and in 2010 became Head of the Discovery team, overseeing a growing portfolio of enabling technology, screening, Hit-to-lead and Lead Optimisation projects. 
He has been involved with the delivery of numerous candidate drugs for multiple disease areas, over 25 of which have been for malaria and has published over 150 papers, book chapters and patent applications. 
He sits on the advisory and review committees for several external drug discovery collaborations within the neglected disease area including the Wellcome funded DNDi-GSK Chagas collaboration.  He is a Fellow of the ¾ÅÖÝÓ°Ôº and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.  He is a co-organiser of the Wellcome Practical Aspects of Drug Discovery Course.

Andy Davis gained his degree in chemistry from Imperial College, London in 1982. He undertook a PhD at the University of Huddersfield with Professor MI Page, studying the alcoholysis of penicillins as a model of their antibacterial action. This was followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at University of Kent, dissecting the energetics of ribonuclease A catalysed hydrolysis of phosphodiesters through quantitative structure-reactivity relationships. In 1988, he joined Fisons Pharmaceuticals and has spent the subsequent 35 years with Fisons/Astra/AstraZeneca applying physical organic chemistry thinking in drug discovery projects, in science, line management, portfolio management and project leadership roles, mostly in the respiratory therapeutic area.
He has published over 80 papers in peer reviewed journals including many highly cited and high impact articles, covering his key interests of physical properties, structure-guided drug design, and the application of QSAR to drug discovery.  Most notably, he introduced the leadlike paradigm to medicinal chemistry, which has become a byword for quality in lead design, and an inspiration for fragment-based drug discovery.  For the past 18 years he has been scientific organiser of the internationally regarded ¾ÅÖÝÓ°Ôº Medicinal ¾ÅÖÝÓ°Ôº Summer School, and co-editor of the ¾ÅÖÝÓ°Ôº’s  “Handbook of Medicinal ¾ÅÖÝÓ°Ôº: Principles and Practice” (2014 and second edition 2023) and its associated IPAD APP.

Simon is Sygnature’s founder and Chief Executive Officer. He is an entrepreneur and industry veteran with 30 years of experience in the pharmaceutical sector.  As well as founding Sygnature in 2004, he was an early stage investor and Director of Peak Proteins Ltd (now acquired by Sygnature), and a cofounder of Step Pharmaceuticals, a clinical stage biotech based in France. 

Simon began his research career as a medicinal chemist at AstraZeneca and later moved to OSI Pharmaceuticals where he was part of the senior leadership team. He has been engaged in the full spectrum of drug discovery programmes – from hit finding, to candidate selection. Simon has a BSc (Hons.) in chemistry and a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Nottingham, and undertook post-doctoral research at the University of Pittsburgh.

Dr Emma Rivers is a Director of Medicinal ¾ÅÖÝÓ°Ôº within the Hit Discovery Department at AstraZeneca, Cambridge, UK. She leads a team of chemists and is responsible for the DNA-encoded library screening platform which delivers hits and lead series for projects across a wide range of targets and therapeutic areas, such as Oncology, Cardiovascular, and Respiratory. Following a MChem in chemistry at Durham University and a PhD in the synthesis of heterocycles at Imperial College London, Emma joined GSK as a medicinal chemist within the Neuroscience team. There she worked on both hit to lead and lead optimisation programs at the research site in Singapore for 8 years before joining AstraZeneca, where she has worked for the past 9 years, primarily on lead generation approaches for early-stage drug discovery projects. 

Simon Ward is currently the Sêr Cymru Professor in Translational Drug Discovery and Director of the Medicines Institute at Cardiff University.

Simon has a wide-ranging experience from over 25 years of drug discovery in senior roles in major pharmaceutical companies, biotech & academia (GlaxoSmithKline, BioCrea, Knoll Pharmaceuticals, Vernalis, Chiroscience, University of Sussex, Cardiff University). He has led multidisciplinary project teams for a wide range of diseases. Within academia, he has successfully secured over £50M funding to lead a portfolio of drug discovery and clinical development projects. He also has considerable experience of commercial deal making and has multiple additional roles in biotech companies.

Simon is a Fellow of the ¾ÅÖÝÓ°Ôº and is an internationally recognised expert in medicinal chemistry leading to many external roles on scientific advisory boards, charity and government funding panels and scientific societies.