Steve Hitchcock

Dr. Steve Hitchcock is Head of Research for Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, Ltd. He joined Takeda in 2012 via Takeda’s acquisition of Envoy Therapeutics where he was Senior Vice President of Drug Discovery and also held the position of Adjunct Professor at The Scripps Research Institute. Prior to Takeda, Dr. Hitchcock had served in senior leadership positions in the research organizations at Eli Lilly and Amgen. He received a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from The University of Nottingham (U.K) and completed a NATO postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University. Over a career spanning 23 years in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology arena, Dr. Hitchcock has been fortunate to work with teams that have developed therapeutic drug candidates spanning a variety of disease indications. He places a strong emphasis on the early establishment of pharmacodynamic-pharmacokinetic relationships and translational biomarkers, including the development of drug-target occupancy tracers, and is a recognized expert in the area of blood-brain barrier permeability and small molecule entry into the CNS. Dr. Hitchcock also has a keen interest in structure-based and computational property- and ligand-based drug design principles and applications of biophysics and fragment-based approaches to drug discovery. He is a co-author on over 70 patents, patent applications, papers, and review articles.