Welwyn Garden City, UK (6th September 2011) - Cresset is delighted to announce the establishment of a new Professional Services division and the appointment of Dr Martin Slater as its new Director of Consulting. Martin joins Cresset from BioFocus where, as Senior Research Fellow, he underpinned the SoftFocus library brand with the development of innovative chemogenomic tools and the design of over 40 commercially successful protein targeted libraries.
“The appointment of Martin reflects the recent strategic expansion of Cresset’s Consulting Services business” said Rob Scoffin, Chief Executive Officer of Cresset. “The Pharma and Biotech market is constantly evolving and changing, and the products and services we provide need to keep pace with these changes in order to continue to offer scientific insight and business value to our customers. The rapidly increasing demand for our expertise, demonstrated by our recent major collaboration with Redx Pharma, has led us to establish a dedicated Professional Services division. Martin’s unrivalled experience of using our tools on customer projects made him the ideal candidate to help drive this division forward.”
“This is a fantastic opportunity to join an exciting company with an excellent scientific reputation. The Cresset team has a world-leading portfolio of products and cutting edge technology for Medicinal and Computational Chemistry,” said Martin. “I am looking forward to delivering the power of these Field based tools on a wide range of customers’ drug discovery projects.”
Martin has 14 years’ experience in the highly dynamic pharmaceutical ‘fee for service’ environment in which he supported medicinal chemistry and a diverse range of programs. After studying medicinal chemistry at the Universities of Huddersfield and Leeds, Martin joined the then start-up company BioFocus in 1997. He pioneered the use of Cresset’s Field-based technologies at BioFocus for targets including GPCRs, Kinases, Ion channels and Proteases for library generation and de-novo ligand design.
For further information, please visit www.cresset-group.com
About Cresset Group Ltd
Cresset develops software for calculating and comparing the molecular Field characteristics of chemical compounds. Field technology uses the surface properties of molecules to evaluate their activities and properties, rather than relying on 2D structure similarity, which enables Cresset’s users to find more interesting, novel and relevant results than other methods. Cresset’s Fields provide a smarter, structure independent way of hit-finding, lead switching and lead optimization in drug discovery and other chemistry-based research projects. Cresset’s Field technologies have been successfully applied to a very wide range of target classes, with and without structural information, on over 100 projects for major pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. www.cresset-group.com
