InhibOx Ltd – Chairman Professor Graham Richards CBE cited on List of Britain’s Top 100 Scientists

07 Oct 2010

Professor Richards recognized for significant contributions to science and business

 

InhibOx, the Oxford-based computational drug discovery specialist, is proud to announce that its Founder & Chairman, Professor W. Graham Richards CBE, appeared in today’s publication in The Times of “Eureka 100: The 100 Most Important People in British Science”

Professor Richards’ inclusion in this list follows a long string of awards which recognize his continuing contribution to science and its commercial application. He has received the Lloyd Kilgerran Prize for the application of science for the benefit of society, the Mullard Award from The Royal Society, the Italgas Prize and the 2004 Award of the American Chemical Society for Computers in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research.

Professor Richards is a leading pioneer in the development and application of computer-aided drug discovery. His research at Oxford University led to his founding Oxford Molecular Ltd. in 1990 which was successfully floated on the London Stock Exchange, before eventually being acquired by Accelrys Inc. in 2000. He co-founded Isis Innovation, Oxford’s spin-out organization, leading to the creation of many very successful technology companies and generating significant funds for the University. He was appointed as Oxford’s first Chairman of Chemistry – a post he held from 1997 to 2006. He forged an innovative investment deal with the company which became IP Group Plc which helped fund the new Chemistry Research Laboratory in Oxford. He is now a Senior Non-executive Director at the IP Group Plc and has served as a council member of the Royal Society of Chemistry and of The Royal Institution.

Professor Richards established the ScreenSaver LifeSaver project – the biggest computational chemistry project ever undertaken, involving the use of over 3.5 million computers worldwide in virtual screening to search for cancer drug candidates. The outstanding success of this project led to his founding InhibOx Ltd., to further develop and exploit the concept of very large scale computational drug discovery. The company, where Professor Richards serves as Chairman, has operations in Oxford and Princeton and is enjoying rapidly growing success with its pioneering use of cloud computing to achieve the scale required for rigorous computational drug discovery. Professor Richards has donated his shares in the company to a cancer research charity.

InhibOx CEO, Paul Davie, today commented, “We are delighted to see Graham’s continuing work, in pioneering new drug discovery technologies and seeing them through to practical commercial application, recognized by his inclusion on this list of the most influential scientists in Britain today. His contributions to science, business and society in general have had a profound, positive impact. Graham continues to act as a positive role model for all scientists seeking to maximize the commercial use their inventions”.

About InhibOx
InhibOx delivers novel and effective computational methods for drug discovery to improve the productivity of lead and candidate identification and optimization, through consultancy and software-as-a-service channels. The company is a pioneer in the application of cloud computing to drive very large scale computation at high accuracy, bringing for the first time no-compromise computational drug discovery processes to bear in pharmaceutical and biotech research. InhibOx was founded by Professor W. Graham Richards, former Chairman of Chemistry at the University of Oxford and world-leading computational chemist. The company grew from the outstandingly successful Screensaver Lifesaver project which involved some 3.5 million personal computers in over 200 countries: the world's biggest computational chemistry experiment finding lead compounds to inhibit cancer targets, anthrax and smallpox. Since then, InhibOx has built up a proprietary technology platform in computer-aided drug design, funded by VCs, private investors, Oxford University and EU grants. Ongoing activities comprise the development of entirely novel computational drug discovery methods; building Scopius, the world’s largest curated database of 3D structures and properties, and their delivery to the life science industries.

Contact Details:
http://www.inhibox.com/
Email: contactus@inhibox.com
Tel: +44 1865 262000