Professor Paul Workman FMedSci, FRS is Chief Executive and President of The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR). Professor Workman is a passionate advocate of personalised molecular medicine and is an enthusiastic practitioner of multidisciplinary cancer drug discovery and development approaches to 'drugging the cancer genome'. He also conceptualised the 'Pharmacological Audit Trail' approach. As well as establishing and successfully leading drug discovery project teams yielding clinical candidates, Professor Workman’s personal and collaborative research utilises molecular pharmacology and chemical biology approaches, including high-throughput and genome-wide as well as hypothesis-driven strategies, to interrogate cancer biology, identify and validate new drug targets, discover and develop chemical tools and drugs acting on these targets, identify predictive and mechanism of action biomarkers, and elucidate mechanisms of drug sensitivity of resistance. He is especially interested in exploiting the addictions, vulnerabilities and dependencies of cancer cells using a combination of small molecule tools and drugs alongside molecular genetic techniques.

Professor Workman's personal research laboratory, the Signal Transduction and Molecular Pharmacology Team, focuses on the molecular pharmacology and mechanism of action of innovative molecular cancer therapeutic agents. There is particular emphasis on exploiting stress and chaperone pathways and also on oncogenic signal transduction pathways as targets for new drugs. The Team collaborates with other Teams in the Cancer Research UK Cancer Therapeutics Unit and the ICR, particularly with the screening, biology and medicinal chemistry Teams, to identify new chemical tools and design potent and selective drug candidates. For example, the Team carried out the cellular and molecular pharmacology work to discover the leading HSP90 molecular chaperone inhibitor NVP-AUY922 and the leading PI3 kinase inhibitor GDC-0941, both of which are now showing promising activity in Phase I clinical trials.