Mark Gallop

Mark Gallop is Executive-in-Residence at 5AM Venture Partners, LLC and consults with emerging biotechnology companies on drug discovery technologies and strategies, with an emphasis on oncology, neuroscience, gastrointestinal disorders and drug design. From 2012 to 2017 he served as the founding Chief Scientific Officer at Nurix, Inc., a venture-backed discovery company formed to explore drug development targeting ubiquitin ligase enzymes, with therapeutic applications spanning oncology, immunology, inflammation and immuno-oncology. Prior to joining Nurix, he was Senior Vice President of Research and XenoPort, Inc., a company he co-founded in 1999 with the mission of improving the clinical utility of medicines by exploiting active transport mechanisms to optimize pharmacokinetic properties of drugs. While at XenoPort, his team discovered Horizant™, a prodrug of gabapentin that was approved by the FDA in 2011 and the MHW in Japan in 2012 for the treatment of restless legs syndrome. Previously, Dr. Gallop was Senior Director of Combinatorial Chemistry at Affymax. He is recognized as an early pioneer and international expert in solid-phase combinatorial chemistry and was a recipient of the ACROS award of the Belgian Organic Synthesis Symposium in 1996 for his outstanding contributions to this field. He is an inventor on more than 100 issued or pending U.S., and PCT patents and an author of over 60 manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals. In 1994, he co-authored a landmark review of the then-emerging field of combinatorial chemistry that has subsequently become one of the most highly cited papers in chemistry. After undergraduate studies in New Zealand, he obtained his Ph.D. degrees in inorganic chemistry from the University of Cambridge and was a Lindemann postdoctoral fellow in the laboratories of Profs. Peter G. Schultz and Robert G. Bergman at the University of California, Berkeley.