Profile of Dr Charles Mowbray
Dr. Mowbray joined DNDi in August 2011 as Head of Drug Discovery with responsibility for lead optimization for drug discovery projects. He has led multidisciplinary discovery teams working on Human African Trypanosomiasis (HAT, sleeping sickness), VL and Chagas disease through highly collaborative global consortia of CROs, academic laboratories, biotechnology companies and large pharmaceutical companies. Dr. Mowbray also helped establish the Lead Optimization Latin America (LOLA) consortium in Brazil working with local scientists in a disease endemic country. He has also applied his medicinal chemistry experience to improve the hit discovery efforts of DNDi through introduction of improved data analysis and informatics platforms, application of predictive computational models, and developing an innovative Neglected Tropical Diseases Drug Discovery Booster consortium with five large pharmaceutical companies. Dr Mowbray also provides medicinal chemistry and drug discovery advice and supports clinical colleagues across DNDi’s R&D portfolio. He serves as the chairman of the Trypanosomiasis Steering Committee for the Global Alliance for Livestock Veterinary Medicines (GALVmed), acts as an advisor to Celgene for their VL drug discovery programme, is a member of the Global Health Innovative Technology Fund (GHIT) Hit-to-Lead Platform (HTLP) Expert Panel, and a member of the Pathogen Box selection committee.
Prior to joining DNDi, Dr. Mowbray spent 19 years at Pfizer Worldwide Research and Development where he was most recently a Research Fellow in Worldwide Medicinal Chemistry at the Sandwich Laboratories, UK. During this time he developed experience as a medicinal chemist, project leader and people manager. He has delivered projects across many disease areas, target classes and medicinal chemistry strategies and from target selection through to clinical candidate delivery. Five of these molecules have entered Phase I and two have achieved POC in Phase IIb clinical studies. Dr. Mowbray is an author of 28 scientific publications and an inventor on 15 patents.