C4X promotes Nick Ray to chief scientific officer

Drug discovery company C4X announced the appointment of Nick Ray as its chief scientific officer on Tuesday, with immediate effect.

The AIM-traded firm said Dr Ray, a medicinal chemist by training who joined C4X in 2016, was currently its senior vice-president of drug discovery, leading the medicinal chemistry, structural analysis and computational chemistry and cheminformatics teams.

It said he would still work closely with Clare Murray, senior vice-president of drug discovery, to advance the company’s drug discovery portfolio from target selection through to pre-clinical candidate generation and partnering, and with chief technology officer Charles Blundell to continue the development of its conformational analysis technology ‘4Sight’.

Dr Ray had more than 30 years of experience in leading key programmes at large multinational companies, the board reported, including Rhône-Poulenc, Celltech and Argenta-Charles River, in the therapeutic areas of oncology, respiratory diseases, inflammation, central nervous system, pain and metabolic diseases.

Eight of the programmes had progressed to the clinic to date.

As head of the chemistry department at Charles River's Harlow site, Dr Ray was responsible for more than 70 chemists, winning the Royal Society of Chemistry Retrosynthesis competition in 2015.

C4X noted that he is a named inventor on more than 75 patents and patent applications, and had published 21 papers and presentation abstracts.

Dr Ray holds a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Birmingham.

“Nick has played a key role in the growth of C4X and its reputation as a leading drug discovery company,” said chief executive officer Clive Dix.

“Since joining the company in 2016, his in-depth scientific expertise, particularly in medicinal and computational chemistry, has enabled C4X to develop a growing portfolio of high quality small molecule drug discovery programmes - the very core of our business.”

Dix said Dr Ray was “highly respected” both within C4X and across its industry, and more recently had made a “significant contribution” to the commercial side of the business with the partnering of its IL-17A inhibitor programme with Sanofi, and its NRF2 activator programme with AstraZeneca.

“We are delighted to announce his promotion to chief scientific officer.”

At 1455 GMT, shares in C4X Discovery Holdings were up 1.41% at 18p.

Reporting by Josh White for Sharecast.com.