Ed J. Griffen obtained his Ph.D. from Imperial College, London, and undertook postdoctoral research at the University of Waterloo-Kitchener, Canada. He joined Zeneca Pharmaceuticals as a team leader in medicinal chemistry working in the CNS, infection, oncology, and chemical biology areas. During a secondment into the computational chemistry group, he co-developed matched molecular pair tools to quantify medicinal chemistry approaches. In 2012 he was a cofounder of MedChemica Ltd. He has taught medicinal chemistry courses at the University of Manchester and in France, and India. He is a named inventor on 16 patents and co-authored more than 26 articles, book chapters, and a textbook with over 1300 citations. He has worked on 4 projects that have entered clinical development. In March 2020 he joined the COVID Moonshot international team as the Design Team Leader which has a lead compound progressing though pre-clinical development toward Phase 1 testing funded by the Wellcome Trust. In 2022 he became the Principal Investigator for Lead Optimisation in the NIH funded ASAP Pandemic Preparedness U19 AViDD centre. His interests are in delivering new medicines faster through data driven decision making and medicinal chemistry education.
