Sustaining Innovation Alumni

Dr Sam Holman

Chemistry, Astex Pharmaceuticals

In FBDD, medicinal chemists often face synthetic tractability challenges which make synthesis rate-limiting for the fragment-to-lead (F2L) process. Chemical technologies such as electrochemistry provide new opportunities for synthesising and elaborating fragments, however this approach is under-explored in FBDD. This project focussed on investigating the use of electrochemistry to access partially saturated heterobicyclic motifs which are often encountered in the F2L or lead-optimisation stages of a FBDD project but are challenging to follow-up due to gaps in the synthetic literature.

Sam Holman is currently working as a Senior Scientist at Illumina, UK.