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

James is currently the Director of Chemistry; with responsibility for synthetic and medicinal chemistry, as well as computational chemistry and cheminformatics.

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.