Brian Warrington

Brian Warrington Ph.D. is a Consultant and Director at BB Consultants Ltd, a UK-based drug discovery technology consultancy, a business he established on retirement from VP Technology Development after a 40-year career in the pharmaceutical industry (SF&F, SB, GSK). Dr. Warrington’s career in pharmaceutical discovery was initially as a medicinal chemist and he achieved notable success in several therapeutic areas. With increasing seniority, his reach extended to the biological aspects of discovery and he served as a Program Director for multi-disciplinary teams seeking unforeseen drug leads for novel targets. This has included work with the Nobel Laureate Sir James Black on the discovery of H2-antagonists, seminal contributions to the original validation of phosphodiesterases and protein kinases as viable targets for drug intervention, leading the team that first demonstrated the utility of protein kinase inhibitors in the cancer field and in 1990 the first identification of PDE 5 inhibitors as potential treatments for male erectile dysfunction, four years in advance of the current market leader. The challenges of truly novel lead discovery (as opposed to screening existing compounds) led to a focus on the development of new technology for high-speed integrated closed-loop discovery platforms and his pioneering work in this area has been recognized by The Association for Laboratory Automation Achievement Award (2000) and the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Millennium Silver Medal for Drug Discovery Methodologies. Dr. Warrington has published more than 50 papers in the fields of medicinal chemistry, laboratory automation, and microfluidic drug discovery and has given as many invited lectures on these subjects. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of London, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and is a visiting professor at the University of Durham, U.K. In the commercial field, Dr. Warrington has driven the establishment of several companies including several that now lead the field in ultra-small scale drug discovery technology.