Exscientia plc announced the appointment of two technology and clinical development leaders to senior roles to significantly strengthen the impact of differentiating technology applications as well as focused oncology pipeline development. Appointed to Chief Technology Officer, John P. Overington, Ph.D., will assume strategic leadership over the company?s technology solutions to further accelerate Exscientia?s AI-led drug design platform and fully realise the transformative potential of integrating AI drug design with automated experimentation. As an early adopter of computational data and machine learning to improve drug discovery, John brings over 30 years?

experience of bioinformatics in big pharma, biotech and academia and has authored over 150 publications on the subject. He joined Exscientia in 2021 as Vice President, Discovery Initiatives, and was appointed Chief Data Officer in 2023. Prior to Exscientia, John held positions at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), BenevolentAI, Pfizer, Inpharmatica and the Medicines Discovery Catapult.

At the EBI, he founded CheMBL, one of the most broadly used and largest global drug discovery databases. John has been a Visiting Professor at University College London and the University of Manchester and is a Committee Member for Society of Medicines Research. Marie-Louise Fjällskog, M.D., Ph.D., will follow Mike Krams, M.D., as the company?s interim Chief Medical Officer and Clinical Development Lead.

Holding a Ph.D. in oncology, she brings deep expertise in this therapeutic field from over 30 years as a board-certified oncologist, researcher and drug development leader. She has a strong track record of determining clinical development strategy, trial design, regulatory strategy as well as setting up and overseeing the teams running over 15 clinical trials focused on small molecules, antibodies and bispecifics in oncology and haematology. As an investigator in academia, she acted as principal or co-investigator in more than 30 studies.

Based in Boston, MA, Marie-Louise has held positions in small biotechs as well as big pharma, including Novartis; most recently, she was Chief Medical Officer at Faron and Lytix. She serves on the boards of several biotech companies, has authored approximately 50 peer-reviewed publications and is an Associate Professor of Oncology at Uppsala University, Sweden.