Peter Simpson

Peter is Director of Screening Sciences for AstraZeneca, and has extensive Pharma experience in early drug discovery. Peter heads AZ’s Early Discovery Partnerships initiative for open innovation. In this role he has established innovative discovery alliances with academic translational centres, SMEs, and other Pharma. He has identified, prioritised and negotiated these partnerships via competitive analysis, strategic thinking and relationship building. Peter is responsible for Alliance Management of several strategic partnerships, and leads the Target Innovation global open innovation initiative for AZ.

My role involves overseeing the quality and curation of the AZ compound collection for screening, and supply of compounds across AZ and to multiple external partners; as well as delivery of compound efficacy screening and of in vitro safety screening to many drug discovery projects. I also lead AZ’s External Partnering in this area, to exploit the collection & screening (EPECS) initiative. This develops and manages novel partnering relationships with external lead generation and chemistry collaborators.