Chris Molloy's Biography

Chris Molloy, CEO, Medicines Discovery Catapult

Chris has over 25 years international Executive and Board experience across multiple areas of Medicines Discovery. Chris began his preclinical research career at Glaxo in 1990. During 14 years in big Pharma Chris led a range of internal and collaborative biotech programmes in respiratory, CNS and enzyme-related diseases. He was also a leader in the industrial revolution of high thoughput screening, helping GSK to a global screening capability of over 100M wells per year. Moving to a natural products biotech in Singapore (as COO, MerLion Pharma) Chris developed a network of international Pharma collaborations in antimicrobial drug discovery. Over 4 years Chris helped two new antibacterials into clinical development (one now marketed and one in PHase 3) and was on the board at Athelas SA, a Swiss AMR start-up. He also developed a CRO business and developed an NMR screening group that was sold to Evotec. Chris became head of Corporate Development of idbs, a global R&D informatics company in 2009 and helped develop the UKs first stratified medicine informatics platform (co-funded by Innovate UK). He also helped extend the use of structured screening and pre-clinical data systems into GxP clinical enablement. In 2013 Chris moved from a long standing Board position to the CEO role at RSA, the world largest senior talent advisory boutique for the life sciences. During his work there Chris introduced the stringent decision-making seen in first-in-man candidate selection to the selection of industrial and academic leaders across the Medicines R&D sector. Chris has consulted for technology transfer and VC companies and is CSO of a virtual biotechnology company focussed on discovering resistance-breaking new Medicines and prophylactics for HIV. Chris was appointed CEO of the new Medicines Discovery Catapult in 2016. He will lead the MDC in developing new approaches for the discovery and early development of new medicines.