Chris Langmead is Professor, Deputy Director, and Better Medicines Theme Leader of the Neuromedicines Discovery Centre at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MIPS), a collaborative venture targeting new medicines development for poorly-treated mental health disorders. He also directs a collaborative neuroscience R&D program with Servier (France) and is the co-founder and CEO of Phrenix Therapeutics, a biotech spin-out from the Neuromedicines Discovery Centre that is developing next-generation therapeutics for schizophrenia.

Prior to these roles this he was Head of Pharmacology at Heptares Therapeutics Ltd., a UK-based biotechnology company (2009-2012), where he was responsible all of the company’s discovery biology. He is an acknowledged expert in drug discovery, particularly in the field of psychiatry, where he has led multiple projects into late stage preclinical development, many of which have progressed into clinical trials. These successes enabled the US$400M sale of Heptares Therapeutics Ltd. to the Sosei Group Corporation in 2015. Prior to joining Heptares, Chris was a neuroscience researcher at GlaxoSmithKline, UK (1998-2009).

He has a degree and PhD in pharmacology from Queens' College, Cambridge and University College London, respectively, was the youngest person to be elected as a Fellow of the British Pharmacological Society in 2012, and was the recipient of the British Pharmacological Society Novartis Prize in 2017. Chris serves on the editorial boards of the British Journal of Pharmacology, ACS Chemical Neuroscience, ACS Pharmacology & Translational Science and Frontiers in Pharmacology. He is also a corresponding member of NC-IUPHAR. He has published over 70 research articles, reviews and book chapters on drug discovery, which have been cited over 5000 times.

Supervision of Honours and HDR students in the Neuromedicines Discovery Centre

• Drug discovery (target validation, hit identification, lead optimisation)
• Next-generation medicines for mental health and CNS disorders
• Allosteric modulation of GPCRs
• Molecular and analytical pharmacology
• Research translation and commercialisation