Dr Timothy Wells has been Chief Scientific Officer of Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) since 2007, building and managing a portfolio of new medicines from discovery through to post-approval studies. In collaboration with a wide network of partners, MMV has launched seven products over this period, which are used to treat millions of children annually. In the last decade, MMV has managed a transformation of the antimalarial drug pipeline, driven by the identification of new targets and inhibitors coming from high content screening, but also structure-based design. These new generation compounds are now in Phase II studies, where MMV has built up strengths in combination sciences and experimental medicine to help identify the best new combination therapies to move into pivotal trials. MMV has pioneered new models for making data and compounds available, for which they were awarded the Open Data Institute Award from internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee in 2015. MMV’s efforts have helped drive innovation in a disease area which is classically considered to be one of market failure.

Prior to joining MMV, Dr Wells spent more than 20 years working in drug discovery and development in the private sector. From 1997 to 2006, he was head of Research for Serono—the Swiss biotech company—where he was responsible for developing products in oncology, neurology, immunology, and reproductive health. Beyond MMV, he advises on a variety of infectious disease projects and is a non-executive director at Kymab, with a personal interest in applying antibody technology in infectious disease.

He earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Chemistry from Imperial College London in the UK with a focus on engineering enzyme transition states and a Doctor of Science in Biology from Cambridge University with a focus on cytokine biology. Wells is a fellow of the United Kingdom’s Royal Society of Chemistry and the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Selected links

Medicines for Malaria Venture