Alexander Macpherson | Executive Director
Eli Lilly & Co.

Alex Macpherson is Executive Director of Novel Platforms within Lilly Small Molecule Discovery at Eli Lilly & Co. in San Diego, where he leads a team tasked with inventing new technologies to change how Lilly prosecutes small molecule targets - with a focus on stabilizing protein conformations and finding and validating cryptic pockets. With over 20 years of industrial drug discovery experience, Alex has worked across small molecules, peptides, and monoclonal antibodies at Eli Lilly (UK and US) and UCB Biopharma (UK and Belgium). Alex was named as a co-inventor of knob domains, the smallest antibody fragments described to date, which are isolated from the ultralong CDRs of bovine antibodies, during his industrial PhD at the University of Bath. Prior to joining Lilly, Alex held senior leadership roles at UCB Biopharma in the UK, where he led the molecular immunopathology research pillar and advanced UCB's knob domain platform. His scientific expertise spans small molecule protein-protein interaction modulation and large and small molecule discovery against GPCRs. Alex holds a BSc in Molecular Biology from Queen Mary University of London, and a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Bath. He is an inventor on three published patents and author of more than 15 peer-reviewed publications.