Andrew Leach

Biography

Dr Leach holds BA and DPhil degrees in Chemistry from Oxford University. He joined EMBL-EBI in August 2016 from GSK Research and Development, where he enjoyed a successful career since 1994, most recently as Global Head of Biomolecular Sciences. He also served as a Trustee of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre from 2006-2015 and was editor of the Journal of Computer-Aided Molecular Design from 1997-2012.

Research Interest

The Chemogenomics team develops and manages ChEMBL, EMBL-EBI’s database of quantitative small-molecule bioactivity data focussed in the area of drug discovery. Although great progress has been made in developing biological drugs, synthetic small molecule and natural product-derived drugs still form the majority of novel life-saving drugs. The process complexity and costs of discovering new drugs has recently risen to the point where public-private partnerships are coming to the fore. Central to this is data sharing and availability of structure, binning, functional and ADMET data. The ChEMBL database stores curated two-dimensional chemical structures and abstracted quantitative bioactivity data alongside calculated molecular properties. The majority of the ChEMBL data is derived by manual abstraction and curation from the primary scientific literature, and therefore cover a significant fraction of the structure–activity relationship (SAR) data for the discovery of modern drugs. Our associated research interests focus on data-mining ChEMBL data applied to drug-discovery challenges.