John Christopher's Biography

John Christopher, Associate Director, Heptares Therapeutics Limited

After a Synthetic Organic Chemistry PhD (with Prof. Philip J. Kocienski, Glasgow, UK) John started his medicinal chemistry career at GlaxoWellcome / GSK, Stevenage, UK in 2000, in the kinase hit-discovery and hit-to-lead area. After five years as lead chemist and program leader for several kinase targets and establishing a kinase fragment screening set, John moved to lead a flexible hit-to-lead group working across multiple target classes (kinases, ion channels, enzyme targets and GPCRs). In 2007 he joined the Immuno-Inflammation area where after initially focusing on GPCR targets he led a protein-protein interaction lead optimisation programme. After leaving GSK in 2009, John joined Heptares Therapeutics (Welwyn Garden City, UK) where he is currently working in lead optimisation on a CNS GPCR target and is responsible for Heptares’ fragment screening collection.