Highlights in Medicinal Chemistry IV

Dr Mark Bunnage

Vertex

Dr. Bunnage joined Vertex in 2016 as Senior Vice President and Site Head for Boston Research. His team works on a number of serious diseases, including alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, and sickle cell disease. Prior to joining Vertex, Dr. Bunnage spent 20 years at Pfizer where he held a variety of roles within Medicinal Chemistry. Dr. Bunnage has broad interests in Drug Discovery and is an author or inventor on over 50 publications and patents. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a visiting Professor in Chemistry at the University of Oxford.

Dr Rhian Holvey

Astex

Rhian Holvey completed her Masters at the University of Oxford in 2009 before moving to the University of Cambridge for the CRUK PhD Training Programme in Chemical Biology and Molecular Medicine, where she was supervised by Professor Chris Abell, Dr Murray Stewart and Professor David Neal. Since 2014 she has been a medicinal chemist at Astex Pharmaceuticals specialising in FBDD with a focus on oncology and neurodegeneration.

William Farnaby is currently a team leader in medicinal chemistry and chemical biology at the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee. He leads a multi-disciplinary team of drug discovery scientists engaged in a collaboration between Professor Alessio Ciulli and Boehringer Ingelheim. This unique collaboration model aims to discover bi-valent degraders to address areas of critical unmet medical need. William has led and progressed protein degradation projects through multiple stages of the drug discovery process and in doing so continues to contribute significantly to the advance of rational degrader design, synthesis and methods of biochemical and cellular evaluation. Prior to this William worked for 8 years at Takeda Cambridge as a senior medicinal chemist, contributing to the discovery of a number of pre-clinical and clinical candidates and leading collaborative programs for the discovery of novel CNS focussed chemistries.