Dr Lee Dawson

Lee joined Astex Pharmaceuticals in 2015 as Vice President & Head of CNS. He is a biochemist by training obtaining both his BSc and PhD from the University of Leeds in the UK. Lee then specialised in neurochemistry / neuropharmacology and their application to Neuroscience Drug Discovery. Over a career of 20+ years in the Pharmaceutical industry Lee has held various positions of increasing responsibility within the Neuroscience research functions at Wyeth Research (in the UK and US), GlaxoSmithKline and prior to joining Astex was Senior Director & Head of Open Innovation for the Japanese Pharmaceutical company Eisai Ltd. During his career Lee has been responsible for global strategic input on all aspects of R&D and has lead projects from early target discovery to phase II proof of concept testing. Lee has a broad scientific expertise in both Neurology & Psychiatry disease areas and has over 80 peer review manuscripts on a wide variety of neuroscience drug discovery related topics.