Julian Blagg, Deputy Director, Cancer Research UK Cancer Therapeutics Unit, The Institute of Cancer Research

Professor Julian Blagg is Deputy Director and Head of Chemistry of the Cancer Research UK Cancer Therapeutics Unit (CTU) at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), London, UK. An experienced and successful medicinal chemist, Professor Blagg joined the ICR in 2007 following 19 years medicinal chemistry and drug discovery experience in the pharmaceutical industry (Pfizer), both in the US and UK, where he was responsible for the successful progression of multiple preclinical development candidates into clinical trials across 4 therapeutic areas. He also developed expertise in compound features and physicochemical properties linked to toxicity, and in small molecule pharmacokinetics.
At the ICR, Professor Blagg works in close collaboration with clinical, genetics, biology, structural biology, computational and drug metabolism experts to discover and develop small molecule therapeutics for the treatment of cancer patients. He leads a personal research team with expertise in analytical, synthetic, medicinal and in silico medicinal chemistry. His team impacts from target identification and hit discovery through to the selection and progression of preclinical development candidates. He is Project Leader on multiple small molecule drug discovery programs across diverse protein classes.