Position

Director of Cancer Research UK Biomolecular Structure Group
Director of the Centre for Cancer Medicines
Professor of Chemical Biology

Areas of Expertise

X-ray Crystallography, Drug-DNA Interactions, Rational Anticancer Drug Design, Nucleic Acid Structure, Chemical Biology of Nucleic Acids, Higher Education Management and Policy, Cancer Therapeutics, Molecular Modelling, and Computer-Aided Drug Design.

Biography

Professor Stephen Neidle was educated at Imperial College London, where he graduated in chemistry and then proceeded to do a PhD on crystallographic studies of natural products and antibiotics. After a period as an ICI Fellow, he joined the Biophysics Department at King’s College, which initiated his interest in nucleic acid structural studies. He was appointed as one of the first Cancer Research Campaign Career Development Awardees, becoming a Life Fellow on moving to the Institute of Cancer Research.

He was appointed to the Chair of Biophysics at the Institute of Cancer Research in 1990, where he was Academic Dean from 1997-2002. He moved to the new Chair of Chemical Biology at the School of Pharmacy in 2002, where he also directs the Cancer Research UK Biomolecular Structure Group. He was the first Chairman of the Chemical Biology Forum of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and continues to be involved in developing the interface between chemistry and the life sciences. He is also Director of the newly-established Centre for Cancer Medicines at the School.

Research Interests

Professor Stephen Neidle’s interests are primarily in nucleic acid structure and recognition by small molecules, and in exploiting this information for the rational design of new anticancer agents. In recent years this has emphasised two principal classes of molecules: G-quadruplexes and duplex DNA. Together with colleagues at the University of Texas, he pioneered the concept of the selective targeting of telomeric DNA with small molecules that stabilise G-quadruplex formation at the telomere and inhibit the action of the enzyme telomerase, which is up-regulated in the majority of human cancers.

More recently this work has led him and his Group to the design of a new class of anticancer molecules, Telomere Targeting Agents, which are currently in pre-clinical development in collaboration with the biopharmaceutical company Antisoma plc. He has published over 350 papers and reviews, and has edited a number of books on nucleic acids and drug-DNA interactions, including the Oxford Handbook of Nucleic Acid Structure. He is also the author of a standard textbook, Nucleic Acid Structure and Recognition.

Awards

Professor Stephen Neidle has received a number of awards for his work on drug–nucleic acid recognition and drug design, including :

• Prize of the Biological and Medicinal Chemistry Sector of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2000).
• Interdisciplinary Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2002)
• Paul Ehrlich Lecturer of the French Societé de Chimie Thérapeutique (2004).
• Aventis Prize in Medicinal Chemistry (2004) .
• George and Christine Sosnovsky Cancer Research Award, by the Royal Society of Chemistry for his contribution to fundamental and translational research relating to telomerase targeting (2008).

• Chemical approaches to the discovery and development of cancer therapies
  S Neidle and DE Thurston. Nature Reviews Cancer, 2005, 5, 285-296.
• A G-quadruplex binding telomerase inhibitor with in vivo anticancer activity
  AM Burger, F Dai, CM Schultes, AP Reszka, MJ Moore and S Neidle. Cancer Research, 2005, 65, 1489-1496.
• Loop-length dependent folding of G-quadruplexes. P Hazel, J Huppert, S Balasubramanian and S Neidle. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2004, 126, 16405-16415.
• Crystal Structure of Parallel Quadruplexes from Human Telomeric DNA. G N Parkinson, M P H Lee & S Neidle. Nature, 2002, 417, 876-880.