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Data-Driven Drug Discovery and Molecular Informatics

Currently also: Chief Informatics and Technology Officer (CITO) at Pangea Botanica, London/UK and Berlin/Germany

Previous positions:

Director Digital Chemistry at NUVISAN Berlin

Associate Director Computational ADME and Safety (Clinical Pharmacology & Safety Sciences/Data Science and Artificial Intelligence - CPSS/DSAI) at AstraZeneca Cambridge

Co-founder of Healx Ltd.

Co-founder of PharmEnable Ltd.

Personal Website

  • Committed to developing new life science data analysis methods (AI/ML/data science) and their application, primarily related to chemical biology, drug discovery and in silico toxicology
  • Expertise comprises data ranging from chemical structure and gene expression data to phenotypic readouts and preclinical information, applied to both efficacy- and safety/tox-related questions
  • Collaborating with academic research groups, as well as  pharmaceutical, chemical, and consumer goods companies (Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, GSK, BASF, Johnson&Johnson/Janssen, Unilever, ...)
  • Co-founder/founding CTO and current SAB member of Healx Ltd. (data-driven drug repurposing for rare diseases, and beyond); co-founder of PharmEnable Ltd.; SAB member of Lhasa Ltd. (toxicology and metabolism prediction) and Cresset Ltd.
  • Coordinator of the Computational & In Silico Toxicology Specialty Section of the British Toxicology Society (BTS)
  • Steering Committee Member of the Cambridge Alliance on Medicines Safety (CAMS)
  • Currently leading a group of ca. 15 PhD students, postdocs, project students and visitors at the Centre for Molecular Informatics at the University of Cambridge, https://www-cmi.ch.cam.ac.uk/centre-molecular-informatics

Publications

Statistical analysis of preclinical inter-species concordance of histopathological findings in the eTOX database.
PSR Wright, KA Briggs, R Thomas, GF Smith, G Maglennon, P Mikulskis, M Chapman, N Greene, BU Phillips, A Bender
– Regulatory toxicology and pharmacology : RTP
(2022)
138,
105308
Retrospective analysis of the potential use of virtual control groups in preclinical toxicity assessment using the eTOX database
PSR Wright, GF Smith, KA Briggs, R Thomas, G Maglennon, P Mikulskis, M Chapman, N Greene, BU Phillips, A Bender
– Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology
(2022)
138,
105309
Augmented Hill-Climb increases reinforcement learning efficiency for language-based de novo molecule generation
M Thomas, NM O'Boyle, A Bender, C de Graaf
– J Cheminform
(2022)
14,
68
A review of biomedical datasets relating to drug discovery: a knowledge graph perspective
S Bonner, IP Barrett, C Ye, R Swiers, O Engkvist, A Bender, CT Hoyt, WL Hamilton
– Brief Bioinform
(2022)
23,
bbac404
scRNA-Seq-based drug repurposing targeting idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF)
A Liu, J-H Lee, N Han, A Bender
(2022)
PL05-01 Using chemical and biological data and AI for predictive safety – fundamental concepts, new readouts, applications, limitations
A Bender
– Toxicology Letters
(2022)
368,
s11
Identification of potential biomarker candidates of drug-induced vascular injury (DIVI) in rats using gene expression and histopathology data
A Liu, J Munoz-Muriedas, A Bender, D Dalmas
(2022)
Integrating cell morphology with gene expression and chemical structure to aid mitochondrial toxicity detection.
S Seal, J Carreras-Puigvert, M-A Trapotsi, H Yang, O Spjuth, A Bender
– Commun Biol
(2022)
5,
858
Monomerization of Homodimeric Trefoil Factor 3 (TFF3) by an Aminonitrile Compound Inhibits TFF3-Dependent Cancer Cell Survival
V Pandey, X Zhang, H-M Poh, B Wang, D Dukanya, L Ma, Z Yin, A Bender, G Periyasamy, T Zhu, KS Rangappa, B Basappa, PE Lobie
– ACS Pharmacol Transl Sci
(2022)
5,
761
Merging Bioactivity Predictions from Cell Morphology and Chemical Fingerprint Models Using Similarity to Training Data
S Seal, H Yang, M-A Trapotsi, S Singh, J Carreras-Puigvert, O Spjuth, A Bender
(2022)
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Research Interest Groups

Telephone number

01223 762983

Email address