Professor Paul Workman FRS FMedSci is Chief Executive and President of The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), London, and Harrap Professor of Pharmacology and Therapeutics.

From 1997 to January 2016, he was Director of the Cancer Research UK Cancer Therapeutics Unit at the ICR – the world’s largest non-profit cancer drug discovery group.

Paul has been responsible for more than 20 molecularly targeted cancer drugs entering clinical trial. He is especially renowned for his innovative research in the discovery, chemical biology and molecular pharmacology of drugs and chemical probes acting on highly innovative molecular targets.

Paul has built and led several successful drug discovery teams in academia – where he has been a champion of the non-profit, centre of disease excellence, team science model – and also in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry.

Paul’s research interests include drugs and chemical probes acting on oncogenic protein kinases and PI3 kinases and he is working on non-oncogene addiction targets, particularly the HSP90 and HSP70 molecular chaperone families and the heat shock transcription factor 1 (HSF1) pathway.

Paul’s interests range across tumour types and include molecular targets in oesophageal cancer.

Before joining ICR, Paul spent 4 years leading cancer research at AstraZeneca and prior to that worked at Glasgow, Stanford and Cambridge Universities. He was a scientific founder of Piramed Pharma (acquired by Roche) and Chroma Therapeutics. In addition to running his own lab, as CEO and President of ICR, Paul now guides strategic developments in the field of basic, translational and clinical cancer research.

Paul also talks, writes and blogs about cancer research and treatment; and also about the drug discovery ecosystem. Paul has won numerous awards and fellowships including being elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2016 and was also named in the Evening Standard’s Progress 1000 list of the most influential people in London.