Dr Andrew Leach

Andrew Leach studied Chemistry as an undergraduate and postgraduate at the University of Oxford, developing methods for small molecule conformational analysis. He was then an SERC/NATO post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, where he worked on the application of computational chemistry and simulation methods to biological systems. He returned to the University of Southampton and three years later joined Glaxo (now GlaxoSmithKline) Research and Development. During more than 20 years at GSK he was involved in the development and application of new platform capabilities for drug discovery in areas including computational chemistry and cheminformatics, fragment-based drug discovery, cardiovascular safety, proteomics and biological mass spectrometry. He also contributed to many therapeutic projects and led GSK’s early Discovery portfolios against protease, ion channel and epigenetic targets. In 2016 he moved to the European Bioinformatics Institute where he is Head of Chemical Biology and Head of Industry Partnerships, responsible for the EBI’s resources in chemogenomics and small molecule entities (e.g. ChEMBL, ChEBI, SureChEMBL) and interactions between EBI and industry. He also has a small research group. His publications include widely-used textbooks on molecular modelling and chemoinformatics.