Frank von Delft
Frank is Professor for Structural Chemical Biology at the University of Oxford, as well as Principal Beamline Scientist of I04-1/XChem at Diamond Light Source; and visiting professor at the University of Johannesburg. As structural biologist he is seeking to help reshape how protein structure determination transforms rational drug design, by developing and making the new methodologies and tools available through platforms and products to ensure they are widely and routinely used by researchers world-wide. His ongoing 10-year ambition is to shrink by two orders of magnitude the time and cost required to develop small molecule inhibitors, by combining national facilities, artificial intelligence, robotics and cloud-based open access science, in order to make the bespoke design of inhibitors a consistently cheap, fast and widely-used approach in biology and medicine. He leads three research facilities that serve large user communities, are critical to multiple large, international research networks, and make widely available the methodologies I develop. In Oxford at the Centre for Medicines Discovery (CMD), he run the crystallography infrastructure that serves 100s of researchers. At Diamond Light Source, he runs both beamline I04-1, used by at least 100 crystallography groups annually, and the world-first XChem facility, that seeds 30 academic and industrial drug discovery experiments annually with high-quality data. He co-founded the COVID Moonshot project, which seeks to bring to clinic a safe, oral antiviral for the pandemic.