Dr Mingqiang Zhang

Expert in drug discovery and medicinal chemistry, Senior Vice President of R&D, Biotica Technology Ltd, Cambridge, UK

                  

Dr Mingqiang Zhang is currently Senior Vice-President of Research & Development at Biotica Technology Ltd, a drug discovery company in Cambridge. Before joining Biotica in March 2004, Dr Zhang was Director of Medicinal Chemistry at Shire Pharmaceuticals. Before Shire, he was Section Head of Medicinal Chemistry at Akzo-Nobel's pharma division Organon (later Schering-Plough & Merck). Prior to joining the industry, Dr Zhang held academic positions at the Leiden-Amsterdam Center for Drug Research (LACDR).

Dr Zhang co-founded ViroChem Pharma which was recently acquired by Vertex for $380 millions, generating substantial returns for shareholders. He also holds an adjunct professorship at the Southern Medical University in China and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

During his career, Dr Zhang has led the discovery of multiple candidate drugs progressed to clinical development or commercialization for potential treatment of CNS, cancer, inflammatory and infectious diseases. He is a (co-)author/inventor of over 100 scientific publications and patents. He is a named inventor and the leader of the project team that discovered the first-in-class muscle relaxant reversing agent Sugammadex (Bridion®) for which he and his team were awarded the 2007 Malcolm Campbell Memorial Prize in Biological and Medicinal Chemistry by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Dr Zhang received his PhD in medicinal chemistry from the University of Antwerp in Belgium (1990) and did his post-doctoral research at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands (1991).