Paul Workman

Paul Workman is Harrap Professor of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the Institute of Cancer Research, London (ICR). He is renowned for his research on the discovery, chemical biology and molecular pharmacology of cancer drugs and chemical probes, particularly those acting on protein kinases, PI3 kinases, molecular chaperones including HSP90 and HSP70, and the HSF1 pathway. Paul has been instrumental in more than 20 molecularly targeted cancer drugs entering clinical trials and he is the originator of the widely-used Pharmacological Audit Trail for biomarker-led drug discovery and development. Following his research at the Universities of Cambridge (MRC Clinical Oncology Unit), Stanford (UICC Visiting Fellow) and Glasgow (CRUK Beatson Laboratories), Paul spent four years in the cancer drug discovery leadership team at AstraZeneca. In 1997, Paul joined the ICR as Director of the CRUK Cancer Therapeutics Unit (now the Centre for Cancer Drug Discovery). Paul was appointed Deputy Chief Executive in 2011 and then served as President and CEO of ICR from 2014 to 2021. In addition, Paul was Director of the ICR/Royal Marsden CRUK Centre and Founding Director of the Convergence Science Centre at ICR/Imperial College, London. As a scientific entrepreneur, Paul was a founder of Piramed Pharma (acquired by Roche) and Chroma Therapeutics and is a Science Partner at Nextechinvest; he also advises many other companies and academic organisations. Paul has received numerous awards, including the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) Team Science Award (Team Leader); CRUK Translational Cancer Research Prize; George and Christine Sosnovsky Award and World Entrepreneur Award – both of the Royal Society of Chemistry; and the International Raymond Bourgine Award for excellence in cancer research. Paul is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, Royal Society of Chemistry, Royal Society of Biology, and European Academy of Cancer Sciences, and he is a CRUK Life Fellow. In 2016 Paul was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science; in 2023 he was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and in 2025 he was announced as a Fellow of the AACR Academy. In 2024, Paul was named the International Chemical Biology Society Global Lectureship Awardee ‘recognized for his outstanding contributions and exceptional achievements in cancer drug discovery, as well as being a role model and leader to the global chemical biology community.’

Paul is passionate about the development and best-practice use of high-quality chemical probes. With Ian Collins he published in Chemistry and Biology 2010 an influential article on ‘fitness factors for small molecule tools’. He was also a co-author of the Arrowsmith et al Nature Chemical Biology 2015 publication announcing the creation of the Chemical Probes Portal and he served on its original Board of Directors.  He currently serves as Executive Director of the Portal, hosted at ICR since 2018, and also as Director of Bioscience. He was lead applicant on the Wellcome Biomedical Resource and Technology grant that provides funding to support, enhance and expand the Portal. In addition, Paul has been instrumental in development of the complementary Probe Miner resource for the large-scale objective assessment of chemical probes (with Bissan Al-Lazikani and Albert Antolin) and the canSAR knowledgebase supporting cancer drug discovery and translational research (with Bissan Al-Lazikani). He is currently Co-Director of CRUK Children’s Brain Tumour Centre of Excellence at ICR and Cambridge University and Group Leader in Signal Transduction and Molecular Pharmacology at ICR. Paul lectures, writes and blogs on chemical probes, drug discovery and cancer research.