C4X Discovery Holdings plc announced the appointment of Nick Ray, PhD, as Chief Scientific Officer with immediate effect. Nick, a medicinal chemist by training who joined C4XD in 2016, is currently Senior Vice President Drug Discovery, leading the medicinal chemistry, structural analysis and computational chemistry/cheminformatics teams. Nick will continue to work closely with Clare Murray PhD, SVP Drug Discovery, to advance the C4XD Drug Discovery portfolio from target selection through to pre-clinical candidate generation and partnering, and with CTO, Charles Blundell PhD, to continue development of company's conformational analysis technology, 4Sight. Nick has more than 30 years' experience leading key programmes at large multi-national companies including Rhône-Poulenc, Celltech and Argenta/Charles River, in the therapeutic areas of oncology, respiratory diseases, inflammation, CNS, pain and metabolic diseases.

Eight of these programmes have progressed into the clinic to date. As head of the chemistry department at Charles River's Harlow U.K. site, Nick was responsible for more than 70 chemists, fostering both the importance of strong medicinal and synthetic chemistry skills and championing professional development for his team, winning the Royal Society of Chemistry Retrosynthesis competition in 2015. He is a named inventor on over 75 patents and patent applications and has published 21 papers and presentation abstracts.

Nick holds a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Birmingham, UK.