Andrew Miller's Biography

Andrew Miller, Professor, Kings College London

Prof Andrew David Miller is currently Honorary Professor (of Organic Chemistry & Chemical Biology) in the Institute of Pharmaceutical Science at King’s College London. Previously he was at Imperial College London where he was founding Director of the Imperial College Genetic Therapies Centre (GTC). He began his chemistry education at the University of Bristol (UK) from where he graduated in 1984 with a BSc degree. PhD thesis research was carried out at the University of Cambridge (UK) in the research group of Professor Alan Battersby, after which he carried out postdoctoral research in the research group of Professor Jeremy Knowles at Harvard University (USA). From 1990-2010, Prof Miller has been a member of academic staff in the Chemistry Department of Imperial College London (UK) and became full Professor in 2002. The research team of Prof Miller has consistently focused on multidisciplinary medicinal research at the Chemistry-Biology and Chemistry-Medicine interfaces. Nowadays, he is considered a leading expert in the use of safe nanotechnologies for the development of next generation pharmaceutical products such as RNA interference therapeutics and diagnostic imaging agents. He is also well known for his expertise in the chemistry of stress and his understanding of how this links to new paradigms in medicinal chemistry. Furthermore, his pioneering work on molecular recognition is being translated into computer-assisted design tools to aid future drug discovery research. Overall research has been very successful and his team is now rapidly approaching the publication of 200 papers, book chapters and alike, including at least 20 patents and patent applications. Prof Miller is also principal writer of the first Chemical Biology textbook (“Essentials of Chemical Biology”) published in August 2008 by John Wiley & Sons. In his career, Prof Miller has received several awards and fellowships, including the Thomas Malkin and Robert Garner prizes for chemistry (Bristol University), an Emmanuel College research scholarship (Emmanuel College, Cambridge), a Lindemann Trust Fellowship and a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship. In 2000, he was awarded the Novartis Young Investigator Award in Chemistry and was elected President of the International Society of Cancer Gene Therapy. More recently he was appointed to serve on the Nonviral Gene Transfer Vectors committee of the American Society of Gene Therapy, and he has been invited to serve on expert Chemical Biology panels for the Finnish National Science Academy. In addition Prof Miller is now a Visiting Professor at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand and has become a consultant in Chemical Biology for the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology, Hyderabad, India. He is regularly invited to give lectures at international meetings, conferences and workshops all over the world. Prof Miller has been responsible for creating four spin-out companies to date from his research work. These are, Proteom Ltd in September 1999, IC-Vec Ltd in December 2001, ImuThes in December 2005, and Mendel BioSciences in January 2009. He maintains a strong personal interest in translating the fruits of academic research to market in the form of laboratory reagents and therapeutic products. Prof Miller is committed to the commercialisation of research output whenever possible. In addition, he has established pioneering University-led-Development programmes based upon key research partnerships with academic and industrial entities in restructuring and developing countries. For this reason he recently become founding CEO & CSO of GlobalAcorn to help implement a vision for strategic, high-level mutual benefits emanating from such global research partnerships.