Andrew Leach

Head of Chemical Biology and Head of Industry Partnerships at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)

Andrew studied Chemistry as an undergraduate and postgraduate at the University of Oxford and was an SERC/NATO post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco. After three years at the University of Southampton he joined Glaxo/GlaxoSmithKline where over more than 20 years he was involved in the development and application of new platform capabilities for drug discovery in areas including computational chemistry and cheminformatics, fragment-based drug discovery, cardiovascular safety, proteomics and biological mass spectrometry. He also contributed to therapeutic projects and led GSK’s early Discovery portfolios against protease, ion channel and epigenetic targets. At EMBL-EBI he is responsible for a number of widely-used resources including ChEMBL, SureChEMBL, UniChem and ChEBI. His group is also involved in various international collaborations and consortia including Open Targets, Illuminating the Druggable Genome and EUbOPEN. His industry team works with the many commercial organisations and companies that make extensive use of the EBI's resources.