Andrew Hopkins of Exscientia: the man using AI to cure disease
It was early one morning in 1996 when Andrew Hopkins, then a PhD biophysics student at Oxford University, had a brainwave as he walked home from a late-night lab meeting.
He was trying to find molecules to fight HIV and to better understand drug resistance.
“I remember this idea struck me that there must be a better way to do drug discovery other than the complex and expensive way everyone was following,” he says. “Why couldn’t we design an automated approach to drug design that would use all the information in parallel so that even a humble PhD student could create a medicine? That idea really stuck with me. I remember almost the exact moment to this day. And that was the genesis of the idea that eventually became Exscientia.”
It was to prove a lucrative brainwave. Hopkins set up the company in 2012 as a spinout from the University of Dundee, where he was by then working as a professor. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) systems, which are being trained to mimic human creativity, to develop new medicines. This involves the use of automated computer algorithms to sift through large datasets to design
Age 50
Family Married with a 10-year-old daughter. He met his wife, Iva Hopkins Navratilova, at Pfizer. Her business, Kinetic Discovery, merged with his to create the experimental biology labs at Exscientia.
Education Dwr-y-Felin comprehensive and Neath College in south Wales; degree in chemistry at Manchester; doctorate in molecular biophysics at Oxford.
Pay £415,000
Last holiday Czech Republic to visit his wife’s family at Easter.
Best advice he has been given “My dad worked in a factory. He said to me: ‘Get a good education and get a job you enjoy doing. It’s worth an extra six grand a year.’ And I definitely got a job I enjoy
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