Prof John Atack

Prof. Atack is currently Sêr Cymru Professor of Translational Drug Discovery at the newly-established Medicines Discovery Institute (MDI) based at Cardiff University. In this role, he has established a portfolio of neuroscience drug discovery projects and has helped raise over £30 million to fund them.

Prior to joining the MDI, he established the Sussex Drug Discovery Centre (2012-17) and before joining academia, gained extensive (>20 years) experience in neuroscience drug discovery within the Pharma industry. Hence, he worked for Merck & Co. in Harlow, UK (1989-2006) and then (2006-2012) with Johnson and Johnson, where as Head of Department he led a group of ~30 neuroscientists in San Diego before moving to lead ~90 neuroscientists in Belgium. He has worked on enzyme, ion channel and GPCR targets that cover a range of CNS disorders including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, cognitive impairment and addiction. He has over 150 publications and a proven track record of leading projects all the way from Target Identification/Target Validation through to clinical development and Phase 2a Proof-of-Concept and has been a major contributor for 15 compounds that have entered development of which 8 have progressed into clinical studies.