Chemistry

Paul Brough joined the Company in 2001, having previously held a role at Knoll Pharmaceuticals. He has a keen interest in fragment- and structure-based drug discovery, and has led med chem programmes on several collaborated projects at Vernalis, from hit ID through to clinical lead status. He was instrumental in the early evaluation and successful implementation of off-rate screening as a new hit ID platform at Vernalis. He has co-authored several patents and publications, particularly in the field of Hsp90 molecular chaperone inhibitors and structurally-related kinases.

James Davidson joined the company in 1997; shortly after gaining his PhD from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge.

During his time at Vernalis, James has worked on numerous protein target classes and therapeutic indications, and is a co-inventor on over 20 patents. Most recently he has led the chemistry efforts on projects targeting Bcl-2 family proteins for cancer.

Alongside project direction, James heads up our scientific computing and software development team, whose goal is to provide tools that help our scientists make the best decisions possible, as efficiently as possible.

Lee Walmsley has been with Vernalis since 2001 and, prior to that, was with Roche for 9 years. Lee has led successful drug discovery projects in collaboration with our partners based in Europe, USA and Japan. He is a champion of bringing new methodologies to our chemistry group. Leading a small technology team, he has established our flow chemistry capabilities and augmented this with state of the art organometallic, electrochemical, redox and photocatalytic chemistry.

Andrew Potter joined what became Vernalis in 1998 after PhD and post-doctoral work at the Universities of Liverpool and Nottingham. As a medicinal chemist, he has a wide range of experience in discovery efforts towards RNA, kinase and PPI targets in CNS and oncology areas. He has been involved with, and coordinated, drug discovery collaborations in the US, Japan and France, from hit ID to late-stage lead optimisation. Andrew is responsible for academic outreach  and business development.