Martin Drysdale's Biography

Martin Drysdale, Head of Drug Discovery Programme, The Beatson Institute for Cancer Research

Martin Drysdale received his B.Sc. (1986) and Ph.D. (1990) in chemistry from St. Andrews University in Scotland. From the end of 1989 to 1991 he was a Parke-Davis Neuroscience Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the PD site in Cambridge, UK and then spent 6 years at Wellcome and GlaxoWellcome in the UK working on projects in the CNS and inflammatory therapeutic areas. In 1997 he joined RiboTargets back in Cambridge UK, then a Biotech start-up company, to head up and develop the chemistry group there working on anti-infective targets. After surviving several rounds of mergers, acquisitions and company name changes he became Director of Chemistry & Structural Science and finally Deputy Director of Research at Vernalis working in the oncology and CNS areas, with a particular interest in Structure Based Drug Design and Fragment Based Methods of hit identification. In January 2009 he moved to his current position as Head of Drug Discovery at the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute in Glasgow, Scotland.