Senior Scientific Advisor (Design for Drug Discovery) to global biotech companies (US, UK, Japan)

Dr. Jonathan S Mason is a Senior Scientific Advisor (Design for Drug Discovery) to global biotech companies (US, UK, Japan) He was until May 2024 Senior Research Fellow at Sosei Heptares (Nxera) and was leading computational chemistry at Orexia Therapeutics (Centessa) for GPCR structure-based drug design. He has 4 decades of global pharmaceutical drug discovery experience and is an experienced leader and scientific expert for drug design technologies. He previously led teams involving CADD & structural biology/chemistry at Lundbeck (DK), Pfizer (UK, Executive Director), Bristol-Myers Squibb (US) & Rhône-Poulenc Rorer (now Sanofi, UK, France & USA). He completed his PhD at Queen Mary, U. London and become an early pioneer of the use of CADD approaches in drug discovery research.

He has always emphasised the key role of lipophilic hotspots as well as polar interactions, clearly now seen in many GPCR structures, and more recently enhanced CADD impact by using full binding site water networks and their energetics for potency, selectivity and kinetics, and using FEP (Free Energy Perturbation) on GPCRs for the prediction of binding affinity and potency. He is a strong believer in the power of interactive 3D stereo visualisation for group as well as individual design sessions.