Andy McElroy

Andy graduated from Churchill College Cambridge in 1980 with a first class degree in Natural Sciences and completed a PhD in synthetic organic chemistry before joining Glaxo as a medicinal chemist in 1983. He spent seven years at the Ware and Greenford sites working on CNS targets and then three years at the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina as the lead chemist on Cardiovascular projects.

Andy joined Pfizer in Sandwich in 1993 as a manager in the Medicinal Chemistry department. He became Therapeutic Area Lead for Cardiovascular and Neurodegeneration Research, and later on Tissue Repair managing a portfolio of projects up to First in Human. He had his first taste of process improvement at Glaxo building strong relationships with IT and operational groups and advancing a range of continuous improvement initiatives.

This interest blossomed over the years at Pfizer and in 2005, lead to him having global responsibilities for coordinating the continuous improvement of research processes and workflow. Andy gained a qualification as an Agile process facilitator during this period.

At the start of 2009 he became site lead at the Sandwich Site for External Research Solutions group, leading a multidisciplinary team focusing on optimising external research and in 2011 founded TRN – The Research Network Ltd, an associate network of drug discovery specialists focused on enabling drug discovery and development. Since 2014, TRN have pioneered the Virtual Bioincubator, an integrated solution to support early drug discovery and development ventures which has led to the creation of several new drug discovery ventures.

Expertise
Chemistry-Medicinal, CNS, CVMD, Dermatology, Pain, Small Molecule, UK, Neurodegeneration, Cardiovascular, Outsourcing, Drug Discovery Strategy, Drug Development Strategy, Funding, Networking, Team Building, Project leadership.