Professor Robert Glen

Professor of Molecular Sciences Informatics and Director of The Unilever Centre for Molecular Sciences Informatics at Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge

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Professor of Molecular Sciences Informatics and Director of The Unilever Centre for Molecular Sciences Informatics, Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge

Professor Glen's current position is Professor of Molecular Sciences Informatics and Director of The Unilever Centre for Molecular Sciences Informatics. He gained his Ph.D. in X-ray Crystallography, computational chemistry and Organic Synthesis from the University of Stirling. One of the highlights was the first co-crystallisation of a reactant and product of a chemical reaction in a single crystal.

At the Wellcome Foundation Professor Glen guided the development of the Computer-aided Molecular Design group. This included Protein Crystallography, Molecular Transport properties and Electrochemistry. He designed the GASP and GOLD computer programs (a BBSRC funded grant, which has over 2000 citations) which are used extensively in the pharmaceutical industry. He is a co-inventor of Zomig (a drug for migraine with ca. $5B in sales) and invented two other compounds that have entered Phase-2 clinical development.

He then became Vice President for Collaborative Research at Tripos Inc., a biotechnology company in St. Louis Mo. He assisted in setting up three biotechnology companies (Arena Pharmaceuticals, Phase-1 Molecular Toxicology and Signase). He obtained and directed a BBSRC grant of £2.1M with University College London (discovering activators of soluble guanylate cyclise and working with The Technology Partnership to develop the Baseplate robot) and managed collaborative research and contract research in drug discovery with many large Pharmaceutical companies. Two of the research programs have compounds in early stage studies in Obesity and Artherosclerosis.

In 1999 Professor Glen moved to the University of Cambridge to become Director of the Unilever Centre. He has published over 120 papers, has numerous patents and is regularly invited to present plenary and other invited lectures.

He has have served as deputy chairman of Lhasa Ltd., on the Science Advisory Board of a number of biotechnology companies and international academic advisory and grant awarding bodies (Netherlands Genomics Initiative, NIH Roadmap), on the editorial board of Journal of Chemical Information and Modelling and the Encyclopaedia of Computational Chemistry, a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a member of the publication board and chair of the IT committee, an honorary fellow of the American Association for Cancer Research and a Fellow of Clare College Cambridge. He has been a consultant to Pfizer, Teva, IDBS, Tripos, Unilever, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Lhasa Ltd. Inpharmatica, Tripos, Pharmacia, Arrow Therapeutics.