Dr Allan Jordan

Allan joined Sygnature Discovery in February 2019 as Director of Oncology Drug Discovery. His role includes scientific oversight of all the integrated oncology projects within Sygnature and the strategic development and enhancement of capabilities and expertise in oncology. This remit spans all scientific disciplines from target validation and hit finding through to pre-clinical development. He has over 23 years of medicinal chemistry and drug discovery experience with an established track record of delivering clinically relevant molecules across a variety of therapeutic areas.

Allan started his career as a medicinal chemist at RiboTargets (now Vernalis) in the UK. After ten years in the lab, he joined Cancer Research UK (CRUK) as Head of Chemistry in the Manchester Institute Drug Discovery Unit. During his 9-year tenure, he led both internal research activities and national and international research collaborations to deliver novel oncology therapeutics, alongside his responsibilities for synthetic and medicinal chemistry, computational chemistry, informatics and structural biology. Three of these projects are now in pre-clinical development, including two first-in-class agents against challenging targets. He was also passionately involved in science communication and research engagement through both direct contact and the broadcast media, engaging in face to face interactions with more than twenty thousand of the charity’s supporters. In 2016 he was a recipient of a CRUK “Flame of Hope” award (the charity’s highest award for voluntary services) for his contributions to research engagement on behalf of the charity.

To date, he has been involved in the delivery of fourteen pre-clinical candidates, of which seven have successfully entered human clinical trials. He has co-authored over 60 scientific publications and is a named inventor on fifteen patents related to drug discovery. He is also an honorary Senior Lecturer in Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Manchester.

Allan has a BSc (Hons.) in Chemistry and a PhD in organic and medicinal chemistry from the University of Manchester and undertook post-doctoral research at the University of Reading.