Richard D. Taylor obtained his M.Chem. in 1997 and Ph.D. (with Prof. Jonathan W. Essex on flexible docking of small molecules) in 2001 from the University of Southampton, U.K., supported by AstraZeneca. In 2001 he joined Astex Pharmaceuticals, where he was involved in virtual screening, docking software development, fragment library design, and fragment based drug discovery, working on successful oncology projects that have entered clinical trials. He moved to UCB in 2005 and is now a Principal Scientist in the Computer-Aided Drug Design group, involved in a range of drug discovery programs for inflammation and CNS disease areas. This has included leading a protein–protein interaction project for inflammation, and he currently leads the fragment technology project at UCB.

Malcolm MacCoss obtained his B.Sc. in Chemistry (1968) and his Ph.D. (1971, with Professors A. S. Jones and R. T. Walker) from the University of Birmingham, U.K. He then completed postdoctoral work at the University of Alberta, Canada, with Professor M. J. Robins. From 1976 to 1982, he worked at Argonne National Laboratory, U.S., on structural studies of nucleic acid components by NMR methods and novel prodrug approaches for nucleoside anticancer drugs. In 1982 he joined Merck Research Laboratories in Rahway, NJ, leaving in 2008 as Vice President for Basic Chemistry. He joined Schering-Plough as Group Vice President for Chemical Research and left in 2010 to found Bohicket Pharma Consulting LLC. He was appointed Visiting Professor of Chemistry for Medicine at the University of Oxford, U.K., in 2013.

Alastair D. G. Lawson was awarded a First in Biology at the University of Southampton in 1980. In 1983 he completed his Ph.D. at the Tenovus Research Laboratory at Southampton General Hospital, where he worked with Professor George Stevenson on anti-idiotype-based therapy for B cell leukemia. He joined Celltech as a research scientist in 1983 and has been closely involved with the discovery of many therapeutic antibodies, including Mylotarg, Cimzia, CMC-544, romosozumab, and olokizumab. Alastair led the development of UCB’s proprietary antibody variable region discovery platform. As Research Fellow and Vice President of Structural Biology, he currently heads UCB’s A2HiT initiative, in which information derived from antibodies is being applied to the discovery of new generations of small molecules addressing protein–protein interactions.