Ben Bellenie

Dr. Ben Bellenie is a Senior Staff Scientist at the Institute of Cancer Research (London, UK), based in the Centre for Cancer Drug Discovery. Ben completed his PhD in organic and computational chemistry at the University of Cambridge, and spent 10 years in the pharmaceutical industry as a medicinal chemist at GSK and Novartis. Ben has worked on and led projects in a diverse range of disease areas including neurosciences, respiratory disease, gastrointestinal disease, and cancer.

At the ICR, Ben’s primary role is in leading multidisciplinary project teams, aiming to discover new treatments for cancer. These projects span multiple modalities, from classical reversible inhibitors, through to covalent inhibitors, and both monovalent ‘molecular glue’ and bivalent PROTAC degraders. This strong interest in protein degradation also continues through supervision of PhD student projects. In addition to student supervision, Ben is further involved in teaching and training the next generation of drug discovery researchers through an honorary Lecturer position at UCL. At the ICR, Ben leads a training seminar series which aims to teach scientists about the breadth of scientific disciplines involved in drug discovery.

Through working with the Chemical Probes Portal team Ben is keen to enable researchers across the scientific community to identify and access appropriate tool compounds for their work, and to work with medicinal chemistry groups in academia and industry to encourage submission and review of new probe compounds to the Portal.