Dr Simon Cook

Simon Cook read Biochemistry at Royal Holloway College, University of London and went on to study phospholipid signalling with Michael Wakelam at the University of Glasgow for his PhD. After a chance meeting over a beer (possibly several) at a conference he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1991 to post-doc with Frank McCormick, first at the Cetus Corporation and then at ONYX Pharmaceuticals, where he studied the then emerging RAS-RAF-MEK-ERK1/2 pathway. After his Post-Doc he stayed on at ONYX as a Staff Scientist working on drug discovery projects. As a member of the RAS Project Steering Committee he was part of the team that went on to discover sorafenib (also called Nexavar ®). In addition he was Project Manager for the Inflammation Project, which he led to partnership with Parke-Davis/Warner-Lambert (now Pfizer). In 1997 he established an independent research group at the Babraham Institute, Cambridge, UK studying the regulation of cell proliferation, senescence and cell death by protein kinase signalling pathways. From 2000-2006 he held a Cancer Research UK Senior Cancer Research Fellowship. He is currently a Senior Group Leader in the Signalling Laboratory and Head of Knowledge Exchange and Commercialisation within the Institute. His laboratory currently receives funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Medical Research Council, Cambridge Cancer Centre, AstraZeneca and Astex Pharmaceuticals. He also collaborates with MISSION Therapeutics and PhoreMost (supported by Innovate UK). He has published >100 papers which have received 9,600 citations (h-index 51)
Homepage http://www.babraham.ac.uk/our-research/signalling/simon-cook