The Centre for Medicines Discovery (CMD) was established in 2020 to help meet the University of Oxford’s aspiration to be a leader in the field of drug discovery. The University’s experience during the Covid-19 pandemic illustrated the benefit of bringing together world-leading teams and capabilities, both from across the University and external partners, to deliver substantial translational impact on healthcare.

The CMD combines teams from the Oxford Target Discovery Institute (TDI) and the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) and is located within the renovated NDM Research Building. This has brought together all of the CMD experts, covering a wide range of early drug discovery capabilities including protein production, structural biology and drug design, high-throughput screening, genome wide functional genomics, mass spectrometry, synthetic and medicinal chemistry, functional cell biology, and research informatics, under one roof.

Collaboration and translational science will remain cornerstones of the CMD, from deep partnerships with academics across the University and wider to help translate basic science into new projects and find efficacious lead molecules; to working closely with industry to develop those leads into new medicines. This seminar will introduce the CMD and the wide-range of therapeutic approaches, cutting-edge technologies, areas of drug discovery research focus, and existing partnerships/opportunities within the CMD to translate scientific discoveries into effective medicines.