Trevor Howe's Biography

Trevor Howe, Director, Johnson & Johnson

Trevor is European Director for External Innovation, Discovery Sciences in Janssen. He is responsible for identifying and developing pre-competitive activities and consortia. In addition he assists in developing commercial propositions for Janssen and J&J which may address fundamental failures or new modalities in the drug discovery process. He joined Janssen in 2003 where he formed the Molecular Informatics group to focus on structural biology, biophysics & computational methods for ligand identification and optimisation in all phases of pre-clinical drug discovery process. Prior to Trevor’s current Johnson & Johnson/Janssen career, he headed the worldwide Computational Chemistry Council for Novartis from 1997 – 2003. He also led several immunology projects which resulted in successful clinical candidates for the respiratory disease therapeutic area. From 1990 – 1997 Trevor worked for Lilly establishing their computational chemistry department in the UK. He was simultaneously a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford with Prof Graham Richards. Trevor’s first degree was in Chemistry at the University of Exeter was followed by a PhD at the University of East Anglia on small molecule conformation. From 1988 – 1990 he was a postdoctoral researcher at SUNY, Buffalo, USA studying glucosidase inhibition for applications to HIV. Trevor serves on several UK scientific advisory bodies and boards, including the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) in Oxford and Toronto. He is a visiting Industrial Fellow at Bristol and Cardiff Universities.