Jonathan Mason's Biography

Jonathan Mason, Chief Scientist, Heptares Therapeutics

Dr. Jonathan Mason is a global Pharma experienced leader and scientific expert for drug design technologies (computational medicinal chemistry / CADD, structural biology, in silico ADME/tox etc) with over 30 years of pharmaceutical drug discovery experience. He currently has roles as a Senior Research Fellow at Heptares Therapeutics Ltd (UK) leading CADD approaches and as a consultant Chief Scientist at Lundbeck Research (Denmark) for predictive technologies and drug design.. He has previously led teams involving Computational Chemistry, Structural Biology, Medicinal Informatics and Knowledge Discovery at Pfizer in the UK (Executive Director MISD) and Bristol-Myers Squibb in the US (Director SB&M), following many years at Rhône-Poulenc Rorer (now Sanofi) in the UK, France and US, building and leading Computer-Assisted Drug Design teams. Dr. Mason started his career as a medicinal chemist.
He has been a pioneer in the development and use of 3D pharmacophore fingerprint methods for both protein structure-based drug design (SBDD) and ligand-based similarity/diversity approaches, together with de novo design & target class approaches. More recently he has driven the use of biological fingerprints to tackle attrition-related problems including lead selection / differentiation and of binding-site water energetics to bring new perspectives for druggability and ligand design for GPCR and enzyme targets.