The Open Targets Blog

SEPTEMBER 21, 2023

After completing my PhD in organic chemistry at the University of Cambridge, I went to Canada as a Leverhulme Trust postdoctoral fellow. I then moved back to the UK to work as a process chemist at GSK, designing the manufacturing routes for small molecule drugs. I’m a chemist by training.

Organic Chemistry 81

Organic Chemistry Process Chemistry Small Molecule Science 81

Practical Cheminformatics

OCTOBER 8, 2024

Testing Claude’s Molecule Generation Ability To test the molecule generation ability of Claude, a general-purpose LLM from Anthropic, I prompted it to generate analogs for hits from fragment screens. These fragment hits are small molecules with between 11 and 21 heavy atoms.

Fragment Screening 125

Fragment Screening Packaging Organic Chemistry Small Molecule 125

Elrig

APRIL 29, 2024

There, I supported AI-enabled DD efforts in their small molecule portfolio. After graduating, Miles went on to work as a scientist on AstraZeneca’s Research and Development graduate programme, working on projects in biocatalysis, computational organic chemistry and machine learning for drug discovery.

Bioinformatics 59

Bioinformatics Drugs Molecular Biology Cell Based Assays 59

Codon

APRIL 28, 2025

A year later, two independent teams engineered GFP into synthetic biological circuits, enabling them to watch living cells act as tiny biochemical oscillators — the start of synthetic biology. First, Hirata was so impressed with his young student that he granted him a PhD in organic chemistry in 1960. Shimomura agreed.

DNA 79

DNA Engineering Research Virus 79