Dafydd Owen

Dafydd Owen has twenty-three years of experience as a medicinal chemist in the design and synthesis of drug-like molecules for Pfizer at its Sandwich UK and Cambridge MA research sites. He obtained his first degree at Imperial College in 1994 before moving to the University of Cambridge to gain a Ph.D under the supervision of Professor Steve Ley FRS in 1997. Having won a research fellowship for postdoctoral work, he spent 1998 with Professor Leo Paquette at Ohio State University. During his research career he has delivered over one hundred invited lectures and is an author on over seventy research papers and patents. He has made contributions seven clinical candidates during his career at Pfizer. He serves as a board member of the Structural Genomics Consortium and sits on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. He currently works in an outward looking, academically collaborative group for Pfizer looking to better understand protein families and their role in human disease through chemistry.

Most recently he led Pfizer's oral protease inhibitor program that ultimately delivered PAXLOVID, the world's first oral anti-viral therapy for the treatment of COVID-19.