Lecture
LED3 Lecture: Drug discovery - The use of data and algorithms in discovery
- Date
- Thursday 27 March 2025
- Time
- Location
-
Gorlaeus Building
Einsteinweg 55
2333 CC Leiden - Room
- CM.1.26
We are pleased to announce Prof. Dr. John P. Overington as LED3 speaker on March 27th. Prof. Overington is a leading figure in computational drug discovery and cheminformatics. Over the course of his career, he has been instrumental in shaping the fields of AI-driven drug design, bioinformatics, and data-driven pharmacology.
Dr. Overington has held key research and leadership positions at Pfizer, InPharmatica , the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), BenevolentAI, Medicines Discovery Catapult, University College London, and most recently ExScientia. He pioneered data integration approaches for drug discovery and predictive modeling. His work has significantly advanced our understanding of drug-target interactions, leveraging large-scale biological and chemical datasets to improve drug discovery efficiency.
Among his most influential contributions is the development of the ChEMBL database, a widely used bioactivity resource that has transformed computational drug discovery. Under Dr. Overington's leadership this database, before known as StarLite and commercially sold by InPharmatica, was acquired by the Wellcome trust and made publicly available via EMBL-EBI. He is furthermore well known for his comprehensive work on characterizing known drug targets in two landmark papers in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery entitled "How many drug targets are there?" in 2006 and "A comprehensive map of molecular drug targets" in 2017.