Harren Jhoti
Harren Jhoti is a structural biologist whose main interest has been rational drug design. He is President & Chief Executive Officer of Astex Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, a biotechnology company he co-founded with Tom Blundell and Chris Abell in 1999. He pioneered the development of fragment-based lead discovery, an approach now widely used in industry and academia to discover new medicines.
Astex's first drug, called Kisqali, which originated from a collaboration with Novartis, was approved in 2017 for patients with metastatic breast cancer in the United States and European Union. In 2013 Astex was acquired by Otsuka Pharmaceutical for $886m, and operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Japanese company. Prior to Astex, Jhoti was Head of Structural Biology at GlaxoWellcome.
