Allan M. Jordan

Dr. Allan Jordan is Director of Oncology Drug Discovery at Sygnature Discovery, an integrated drug discovery CRO based in the UK. His current roles include scientific oversight of the oncology projects within Sygnature and the strategic development and enhancement of capabilities and expertise in oncology, across all scientific disciplines from target validation and hit finding through to pre-clinical development.

He gained a BSc in Chemistry from UMIST in 1993 and, after a short spell as a teaching assistant in Arizona, he returned to UMIST to conduct post-graduate research in anti-cancer natural products. Following post-doctoral work at the University of Reading, he joined Vernalis in Cambridge, where he worked on a wide variety of projects. On leaving Vernalis in 2009, he spent ten years as Head of Chemistry at the CRUK Manchester Institute Drug Discovery Unit where, alongside responsibilities for management of the chemistry team and progression of the drug discovery portfolio, he built and oversaw the group’s capabilities in structural biology, computational chemistry and chemoinformatics.

To date, he has been involved in the delivery of eleven pre-clinical candidates, of which six have successfully entered human clinical trials. He has co-authored almost 60 scientific publications and is a named inventor on fifteen patents related to drug discovery. He is also an honorary Senior Lecturer in Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Manchester.