Young Industrialist of the Year Award 2009 - Highly Commended

Steven Woodhead
Astex Therapeutics

Highly commended for his contribution to drug discovery at Astex Therapeutics.

About the candidate

Steven Woodhead is a Senior Research Associate working in the medicinal chemistry group at Astex Therapeutics in Cambridge, UK. He has been at Astex since 2001 where he has played a key role in establishing and developing their discovery chemistry platform.

Throughout his time at Astex he has gained considerable experience in fragment based drug discovery and structure guided design, working across a broad range of oncology targets through all phases of the discovery process. In particular, from 2003 he was the project leader of Astex's protein kinase B (PKB, Akt) drug discovery project which was a scientific collaboration with The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) and Cancer Research Technology (CRT), and subsequently partnered with AstraZeneca. This programme has recently delivered a drug candidate, AT13148, which has been licensed to Cancer Research UK (CR UK) under the charities' clinical development partnership programme.

Before beginning his career at Astex, he carried out postdoctoral research at Florida State University under the supervision of Professor Robert Holton and subsequently at The University of Nottingham with Professor Gerry Pattenden FRS. He received his PhD in synthetic organic chemistry from the University of Sheffield in 1999 under the guidance of Professor Alan Spivey.