The Royal Society – A human focus for 21st century life sciences

Professor Chris Molloy

Professor Chris Molloy has a 30-year international board and executive career across a unique range of life sciences R&D disciplines.

His career began in preclinical research at Glaxo, where he was closely involved with the industrialisation of high throughput discovery. In 2004 he moved to Asia as COO of MerLion Pharmaceuticals, a Singaporean biotech that developed into an award-winning multinational anti-infectives R&D biotech. Chris then ran corporate development for the global informatics firm, idbs during which time it won a Queen’s Award for Enterprise, became a Fast-track 100 company, and the first UK firm to develop a stratified medicine software platform using real-world health data.

Chris spent three years as CEO of the RSA Group, the global life science executive search specialist before in 2016 becoming the founding CEO of Medicines Discovery Catapult (MDC); the national centre for innovation in drug discovery. During its first five years, under Chris’ leadership MDC has leveraged its Innovate UK grant fourfold, worked with over 150 UK companies and assisted the discovery of UK drug assets worth over £1bn. During the pandemic, Chris was the founding Director of the UK Lighthouse Labs Network – the largest diagnostics project in UK history – and chaired the industry-governmental consortium that increased UK lateral flow manufacturing capacity by twenty-fold.

Chris chairs the IP Advisory Committee for the Association of Medical Research Charities and the Industry Advisory Board for Manchester’s Biomedical Research Centre & Health Innovation Manchester. Chris is a Member and Trustee of the Institute of Cancer Research and holds an honorary chair at the University of Manchester.

Chris is responsible for leading an experienced Executive Team and a cohort of over 130 specialists that make up MDC to achieve our vision of reshaping drug discovery for patient benefit.