Paul Finn PhD

Dr. Paul completed his undergraduate biochemistry degree at St Peter’s College, Oxford in 1981 and holds a PhD from Manchester University (1985) on the prediction of protein structure by theoretical methods. Between 1985 and 1990, Paul worked as a scientist in the computational chemistry group at SmithKline Beecham, where he focused on the discovery of novel antibiotic agents. In 1990, he moved to Pfizer’s computational chemistry group where he was responsible for developing Pfizer’s in-house approach to virtual screening. In 1998, Paul joined Prolifix, a UK biotechnology company that was acquired in 2002 by TopoTarget, a listed drug development company focused on oncology. Following this acquisition, Paul became group director of R&D and was responsible for TopoTarget’s extremely successful HDAC inhibitor program which led to the discovery and development of Beleodaq™, which was granted approval for the treatment of relapsed or refractory PTCL by the FDA in July 2014. In 2004 Paul moved to InhibOx, a spin-out company from the Chemistry Department of the University of Oxford focused on computer-aided drug design. Paul joined the staff at Buckingham as a Professorial Research Fellow in 2013, a joint appointment between the Clore Laboratory and Applied Computing Department. Additionally, he remains CEO of InhibOx and runs a drug design consultancy Affinity Drug Design.