Dr Gurdip Bhalay's team focuses on the design and synthesis of safe and effective drugs for the treatment of cancer.
Dr Gurdip Bhalay is a member of the Cancer Research UK Cancer Therapeutics Unit where he uses his experiences in medicinal chemistry and chemical biology to help discover new drugs and advance the science of drug discovery. He has worked at big pharma as well as contract research organisations gaining over 20 years’ experience.
Ms Imogen Andrews obtained an MChem from the University of York, during which she carried out a placement year in the Discovery High-Throughput Chemistry Department at GSK. Imogen is a 1st year PhD student, working collaboratively between Vlad Pena’s group in the Division of Structural Biology and the Cancer Therapeutics Unit to design anti-tumour drugs that target the spliceosome.
Dr Vassilios Bavetsias is a Senior Staff Scientist in the Cancer Research UK Cancer Therapeutics Unit at The Institute of Cancer Research, London. He works on the design and synthesis of small molecules as cancer therapeutics.
Ms Charlotte Bayley obtained a MChem degree from the University of East Anglia in 2020, during which she carried out a placement year at Iceni Diagnostics working in carbohydrate based diagnostics for infectious diseases. Charlotte is working towards a PhD degree in the area of chemical biology and designing novel probes for investigating the tumour microenvironment.
Dr Edward Briggs joined the ICR in January 2021 as a Postdoctoral Training Fellow. Ed obtained his MChem from the University of Southampton which included an undergraduate project with Professor Bruno Linclau on the fluorination of glucose and galactose derivatives and a placement at Vertex Pharmaceuticals. Following this, he then carried out his PhD with Dr James Bull at Imperial College London, developing novel synthetic methods to access sulfoximines and sulfonimidamides.
Dr Joshua Clark studied for his undergraduate degree in Chemistry at the University of Bristol before moving to the University of St Andrews for his PhD where he worked under the supervision of Professor David O’Hagan. His PhD project involved the synthesis and study of selectively fluorinated cyclohexane derivatives. He then worked as a radiochemist for Eurofins Selcia before joining the ICR in June 2022 as a Postdoctoral Training Fellow.
Dr Thomas Clough joined the ICR in January 2021 as a Postdoctoral Training Fellow. Tom studied chemistry at the University of Southampton, where he obtained an MChem following a research project on lanthanide chelators for medical imaging at the University of British Columbia. Following this, he completed a PhD in Professor Nick Long’s group at Imperial College London, working on the design, synthesis and testing of imaging probes targeted to the pancreas.
Ms Elizabeth Cosgrove obtained an MSci in Chemistry with German from University College London in June 2021. She carried out her final year research project at Humboldt University in Berlin, investigating novel fluorination routes using transition metal-based catalysts. Beth joined the ICR in October 2021 as a PhD student in the Cancer Therapeutics Unit looking at synthetic oligomers as RNA helicase inhibitors.
Dr Federica Gigante joined the ICR in September 2021 as a Higher Scientific Officer. Federica carried out her PhD in medicinal chemistry at the University of Dundee, in the group of Professor Ian Gilbert, her research focused on antiparasitic compounds. She then worked as a synthetic and medicinal chemist in a few companies (Evotec, Angelini, C4T, Eli Lilly) developing large libraries of compounds for several research projects. She then moved to Dotmatics, where she specialized in scientific software used in medicinal chemistry, before returning to research and joining the ICR, where she brings her experience to develop new anticancer compounds.
Matthew Martin is an organic chemist and postdoctoral researcher in the Cancer Therapeutics division. Matthew completed his undergrad and master’s degree at Keele University and then obtained his PhD at the University of Glasgow. His research experience is founded on a methodological-based approach to organic synthesis and he has developed a keen interest in the discovery of new reactions, characterisation of novel compounds and detailed study of reaction mechanisms.
Gitanjali graduated with a MChem degree from the University of Oxford in 2019, completing her masters in Stephen Faulkner’s group researching MRI probes using lanthanide complexes. She is a third year PhD student, part of the ICR-Imperial Convergence Centre and is jointly supervised by Gabriela Kramer-Marek in the Pre-Clinical Molecular Imaging team. Her PhD is focused on developing and radiolabelling small molecule tracers for PET imaging using Fluorine-18 as well as completing their in vitro and in vivo biological evaluation.