Professor Bissan Al-Lazikani is formally trained in molecular biology and computer science: BSc (Hons) in molecular biology from
UCL, MSc in Computer Science from
Imperial College then PhD in
Computational Biology from the
Cambridge University. Subsequently, she became a Howard Hughes postdoctoral fellow at the laboratories of Professor
Barry Honig in
Columbia University, New York, where she focused on structure analysis, prediction and modelling for the purpose of understanding the basis of
ligand-receptor interactions. After that, she joined a London-based biotechnology company, Inpharmatica, where she led a team to develop chemogenomics databases and tools to aid target prioritisation and drug discovery. These are now available to the community via a Wellcome strategic award through the
ChEMBL resources at the
European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). She joined the
Institute of Cancer Research, London, in 2009 to establish and lead the Computational Biology and Chemogenomics Team in order to innovate and apply computational techniques to cancer drug discovery, in a long-term collaboration with Professor
Paul Workman FRS. She then led the creation of the world’s largest cancer knowledge base, canSAR, as well as the novel,
Big Data-driven approaches for objective and systematic evaluation of therapeutic targets for cancer. She also led the creation of ProbeMiner, a data-driven Chemical Probe assessment resource. She was appointed head of the Department of Data Science at the ICR. In this role, she led the creation of The Knowledge Hub, a multidisciplinary, AI-enabled environment for clinical research and therapy stratification. In 2021 she joined
MD Anderson Cancer Center, in
Houston, Texas, where she is Director of Therapeutics Data Science, Professor in the Department of Genomic Medicine and founding faculty of MD Anderson’s Institute of Data Science for Oncology (IDSO). She is a joint applicant for the Wellcome Biomedical Resource award as well as the Director of Informatics and Technologies for the
Chemical Probes Portal. She is vice-chair of the
Cancer Research UK Early Detection and Diagnosis Expert Panel. She serves on numerous scientific advisory boards and funding panels, and is a Fellow of The
Royal Society of Biology, and a member of the
British Computer Society. Her published works have specialised in
drug discovery,
genomics, small molecule drug discovery and new drug discovery. As of April 2022 she is associated with more than 100 scientific works, cited over 21,000 times with an impact factor of 45. She has also worked in the commercial sector, leading novel method development and applied bioinformatics teams. == References ==