About the Centre
Our Team
University of Oxford
| Cassandra Adams | Translational Scientist, CMD |
| Paul Brennan | PI, Medicinal Chemistry, CMD |
| Charlotte Deane | PI, Department of Statistics |
| Brian Marsden | PI, Research Informatics, CMD |
| Alejo Nevado-Holgado | PI, Department of Psychiatry |
| Cornelia van Duijn | PI, Nuffield Dept of Population Health |
| Benoit Hastoy | Scientific Director and PI, Diabetes UK Lawrence Fellow, OCDEM |
| Gamma Chi | Senior Scientist, CMD |
| Karen Froud | Programme Manager, CMD |
| Brittany Ulm | PDRA, Bioinformatics, Department of Psychiatry |
| Christopher Fage | PDRA, Structural Biology, CMD |
| Michael Miller | PDRA, Structural Biology, CMD |
| Upamanyu Ghose | RA, Bioinformatics, Department of Psychiatry |
King Abdulaziz University
| Dr Ashwag Albukhari | aalbukhari@kau.edu.sa |
| Dr Amer Asseri | ahasseri@kau.edu.sa |
| Dr Aliaa Amr Alamoudi | aaalamoudi2@kau.edu.sa |
| Dr Rami Mosaoa | rmosaoa@kau.edu.sa |
DPhil students
| Sihao Xiao | Work Package 2 |
| Kholod Alhasani | Work Package 2 |
| Hadeel Abozenadah | Work Package 4 |
| Jana Malki | Work Package 3a |
| Yeal Ben Gigi | Work Package 5 |
| Amelia Henley | Work Package 4 |
Our Workflow
WP1: Clinical landscape in KSA
Lead: Dr Amer Asseri
Key Activities: Collecting and sequencing genetic samples from the KSA population for the Centre’s selected disease areas for use in target identification and drug design.
Milestone: Identification of KSA-specific drug targets
WP2: Artificial Intelligence in novel target discovery
Leads: Prof Alejo Nevado-Holgado and Prof Cornelia van Duijn
Key Activities: Apply AI to genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic profiles of KSA patients to nominate targets. Validate targets with EHRs epidemiology
Milestone: Development of Neural Network methods to process genetic data, identification and validation of novel drug targets
WP3: Target biological characterisation
Leads: Prof Gamma Chi (3a), Dr Benoit Hastoy (3b) and Dr Emma Mead (3c)
Key Activities: Investigation of pathways and mechanisms of identified genetic driver of disease using biochemical, structural and cellular approaches. WP3b and WP3c specialising in specific disease areas.
Milestone: Characterisation of biology of novel targets and creation of assays
WP4: Drug design and discovery
Lead: Prof Paul Brennan
Key Activities: Chemical tool compound design to be guided by pharmacophoric information, computational chemistry and knowledge of metabolic liabilities.
Milestone: Identification of potential binding locations
WP5: AI methodology for drug design
Lead: Prof. Brian Marsden and Prof. Charlotte Deane
Key Activities: Utilizing machine learning, structural bioinformatics and artificial intelligence, plus natural language processing (NLP) holds the promise of highly optimised and efficient novel drug design
Target Milestone: AI-led optimisation of novel drug design