Dr Andrew Leach

Andrew is a computational chemist interested in molecular design and understanding reactions. He is an inventor of capivasertib, an Akt inhibitor approved as a treatment for certain types of breast cancer. Andrew is also a founder and director of Medchemica limited, a company that provides software and consulting across the pharmaceutical industry and in particular applies Matched Molecular Pair Analysis, an explainable AI method that he helped develop and popularise.

Andrew studied chemistry as an undergraduate and obtained his PhD from the group of Prof S. V. Ley at Cambridge University. He subsequently won a Fulbright scholarship to undertake research at the University of California, Los Angeles with Prof K. N. Houk. He then worked for Astrazeneca where he was a computational chemist working in drug design in the areas of cancer and then diabetes and obesity. He joined Liverpool John Moores university in 2012 and moved to Manchester in 2019.