Prof Paul Brennan has been appointed Chief Scientific Officer of the Alzheimer’s Research UK Oxford Drug Discovery Institute, which we are very excited about (ARUK ODDI). The Alzheimer’s Research UK Drug Discovery Alliance, which promotes the discovery and validation of innovative dementia medicines, includes the ODDI. It is one of three dedicated Drug Discovery Institutes based in Oxford, Cambridge, and UCL. Prof Brennan became the Head of Chemistry at the ODDI in 2015. He has been instrumental in building and leading the Institute’s varied portfolio of drug development initiatives as a highly competent medicinal chemist with a particular specialisation in early drug discovery. Paul earned his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked on combinatorial chemistry and antibiotics. Paul came to California to work for Amgen after completing post-doctoral research on total synthesis at the University of Cambridge. Oncology kinase inhibitors were the focus of his study. Paul moved to Pfizer in Sandwich, UK, after two years at Amgen, then in 2011, he joined the Structural Genomics Consortium as a Professor of Medicinal Chemistry to find molecular probes for epigenetic proteins.
