Chris Walpole

At SGC, Chris leads the Structure-Guided Drug-Discovery Coalition, a multi-centre program funded by the Gates Foundation, whose objective is to deliver lead compounds for high-value targets for tuberculosis, malaria and cryptosporidiosis, into the global drug-discovery pipelines of development partners. Chris' core expertise is small-molecule hit identification to clinical candidate drug discovery, and early development. He received his DPhil from the University of Sussex, in the UK and worked as a post-doctoral fellow in the Sandoz Institute for Medical Research, within UCL, in London UK. As a Medicinal Chemist, in Novartis and AstraZeneca, Chris led the medicinal chemistry strategy and managed teams in multiple lead-optimisation and lead-identification projects within the pain and neuroscience disease areas. As director of Medicinal Chemistry, Chris led Medicinal Chemistry and Discovery project teams to deliver high-quality leads and candidate drugs into early development and beyond for over 25 years. He has led internal teams of scientists of up to 50 people as well as external contract research teams for several years.