Tom Blundell

University of Cambridge, UK

Sir Tom Blundell, FRS, is a structural biologist. He was a member of the team of Dorothy Hodgkin that solved in 1969 the first structure of a protein hormone, insulin. Blundell has made contributions to the structural biology of polypeptide hormones, growth factors, receptor activation, signal transduction, and DNA double-strand break repair, subjects important in cancer, tuberculosis, and familial diseases.

He has developed software for protein modeling and understanding the effects of mutations on protein function, leading to new approaches to structure-guided and fragment-based drug discovery. In 1999 he co-founded the oncology company Astex Therapeutics, which has moved ten drugs into clinical trials. He is a Member of EMBO and Academia Europaea. He won many awards including the Alcon Award; Ciba Medal; Feldberg Prize; Gold Medal of, Society of Chemical Industry; Pfizer European Prize. Most recently he received the Philosophical Society Fellows Prize.

http://www.bioc.cam.ac.uk/people/uto/blundell
http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/news/people-skills-training/2014/140130-f-gb-bioscience-pioneers-tom-blundell/

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