Mark J. O'connor PhD

Mark J O'Connor is devoted 20 years of his career to understanding the DNA damage response, with the aim of determining how this can be exploited to develop potential new treatments for cancer patients. Championing the growth of DDR within AstraZeneca, his current role involves informing the strategy to identify and develop inhibitors of DDR in oncology. After going to Bristol University in 1983 to study Microbiology, he gained a Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics before moving to Singapore as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, where he worked on the transcriptional regulation of human papillomavirus oncogenes and their association with cervical cancer.

In 1999, he returned to the UK to take up a position as one of the three science team leaders at KuDOS, a spin-out biotech company based on the work of Professor Steve Jackson at Cambridge University. Here, he researched the cellular network of pathways that minimize the daily impact of DNA damage in normal tissue but represent an Achille’s heel in cancers, where DDR dependencies can be targeted to generate new therapeutic treatments for cancer. It was at KuDOS in 2004 that he first started working on olaparib, a PARP inhibitor.