Harren Jhoti (born 1962 ) is an Indian-born British

structural biologist Structural biology is a field that is many centuries old which, and as defined by the Journal of Structural Biology, deals with structural analysis of living material (formed, composed of, and/or maintained and refined by living cells) at every le ...

whose main interest has been rational

drug design Drug design, often referred to as rational drug design or simply rational design, is the inventive process of finding new medications based on the knowledge of a biological target. The drug is most commonly an organic small molecule that acti ...

and discovery. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: He is president and

chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

(CEO) of biotechnology company

Astex Pharmaceuticals Astex Pharmaceuticals ("Astex") is a biotechnology company focused on the discovery and development of drugs in oncology and diseases of the central nervous system. Astex was founded in 1999 by Sir Tom Blundell, Chris Abell & Harren Jhoti, and i ...

("Astex") which is located in

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

Career

Jhoti co-founded Astex with

Tom Blundell Sir Thomas Leon Blundell, (born 7 July 1942) is a British biochemist, structural biologist, and science administrator. He was a member of the team of Dorothy Hodgkin that solved in 1969 the first structure of a protein hormone, insulin. Blun ...

and

Chris Abell Christopher Abell (11 November 1957Abell, Prof Christopher. In ''Debrett's People of Today 2012'' (accessed 15 January 2012) ''(subscription required)'' – 26 October 2020) was a British biological chemist. He was Professor of Biological Chem ...

in 1999. He pioneered the development of fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD), an approach now widely used in industry and academia, which identifies small molecules with potential therapeutic potential as part of the drug discovery process. Jhoti was Astex's chief scientific officer until November 2007 when he was appointed CEO. In 2013, Astex was acquired for around USD $900 million and now operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of

Otsuka Pharmaceutical (), abbreviated OPC, is a pharmaceutical company headquartered in Tokyo, Osaka and Naruto, Japan. The company was established August 10, 1964. History OPC's parent company Otsuka Holdings Co. Ltd. joined the Tokyo Stock Exchange through an ini ...

Co. Ltd, headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Prior to Astex, Jhoti was head of structural biology at GlaxoWellcome (now GSK). Before founding Astex in 1999, he was head of structural biology and bioinformatics at GlaxoWellcome in the UK (1991-1999). Prior to GlaxoWellcome, Jhoti was a post-doctoral scientist at

the University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

. Jhoti received both his BSc (Hons) in biochemistry in 1985 and PhD in

protein crystallography X-ray crystallography is the experimental science determining the atomic and molecular structure of a crystal, in which the crystalline structure causes a beam of incident X-rays to diffract into many specific directions. By measuring the angles ...

in 1989 from the

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degree ...

Honours, fellowships and awards

Jhoti's scientific achievements have been recognised by the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

, the

Royal Society of Chemistry The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is a learned society (professional association) in the United Kingdom with the goal of "advancing the chemistry, chemical sciences". It was formed in 1980 from the amalgamation of the Chemical Society, the Ro ...

, the

Royal Society of Biology The Royal Society of Biology (RSB), previously called the Society of Biology, is a learned society and professional association in the United Kingdom created to advance the interests of biology in academia, industry, education, and research. Fo ...

and the Academy of Medical Sciences. He has also received the UK BioIndustry Association (BIA)'s Lifetime Achievement Award (2018) and the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry's Prous Institute-Overton and Meyer Award for New Technologies in Drug Discovery (2012). Jhoti has previously been recognised as the Royal Society of Chemistry's Entrepreneur of the Year Entrepreneur of the Year (2007). He has also served on the board of the BIA between 2013-2015. Jhoti has been published in ''

Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physics, physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomenon, phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. ...

'' and ''

Science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...

'', and was featured in ''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...

'' magazine after Astex was named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum in 2005. Jhoti was appointed

Officer of the Order of the British Empire The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, and public service outside the civil service. It was established o ...

(OBE) in the

2023 New Year Honours The 2023 New Year Honours are appointments by some of the 15 Commonwealth realms to various orders and honours to recognise and reward good works by citizens of those countries. The New Year Honours are awarded as part of the New Year celebration ...

for services to cancer research and drug discovery.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Jhoti, Harren Living people Fellows of the Royal Society Fellows of the Royal Society of Biology Fellows of the Royal Society of Chemistry Fellows of the Academy of Medical Sciences (United Kingdom) 1962 births Structural biologists Indian emigrants to England Naturalised citizens of the United Kingdom Indian biologists British biologists Officers of the Order of the British Empire Alumni of Queen Mary University of London Alumni of Birkbeck, University of London