Paul Workman Ph.D

Paul Workman Ph.D General Information

Biography

Dr. Paul Workman serves as Team Leader at The Institute of Cancer Research. He serves as a Scientific Partner at Nextech Invest. He is a passionate advocate of personalized molecular medicine and is an enthusiastic practitioner of multidisciplinary cancer drug discovery and development approaches to 'drugging the cancer genome'. He also conceptualized the 'Pharmacological Audit Trail' approach. As well as establishing and successfully leading drug discovery project teams yielding clinical candidates, Professor Workman's personal and collaborative research utilizes molecular pharmacology and chemical biology approaches, including high-throughput and genome-wide as well as hypothesis-driven strategies, to interrogate cancer biology, identify and validate new drug targets, discover and develop chemical tools and drugs acting on these targets, identify predictive and mechanism of action biomarkers, and elucidate mechanisms of drug sensitivity of resistance. He is especially interested in exploiting the addictions, vulnerabilities, and dependencies of cancer cells using a combination of small molecule tools and drugs alongside molecular genetic techniques. Professor Workman has successfully built a series of multidisciplinary drug discovery and development teams in the academic, large pharma, and biotechnology company sectors. Through this experience, he has been able to combine the best elements of each of these environments. He has been responsible for the discovery of a number of drug development candidates, including in particular path finding inhibitors of the HSP90 molecular chaperone and the PI3 kinase family of signaling enzymes. Professor Workman completed his BSc in Biochemistry at the University of Leicester UK (1973) and his Ph.D. in Cancer Pharmacology at the University of Leeds UK (1977). In 1976 he moved to the Medical Research Council's Clinical Oncology Unit in the MRC Centre, University of Cambridge UK where he established a preclinical and clinical cancer pharmacology laboratory. He developed his early career in Cambridge from 1976 to 1990, focusing mainly on drugs designed to exploit tumor hypoxia and contributing to the discovery and clinical development of several hypoxia-targeted agents, leading to a tenured professorial level appointment.