Dr Daniel Marks, Senior Medical Director, Early Clinical Development at AstraZeneca and Consultant Physician with expertise in Acute Medicine and Clinical Pharmacology at University College London Hospital
What do you do? and what is a typical week for you?
I am an academic clinician with expertise in clinical pharmacology and toxicology, immunology and inflammatory diseases, and experimental medicine. My typical week focuses on the design and delivery of transformational new medicines for immunoinflammatory diseases, from target identification through to first-time-in-human and early phase drug trials. I am also a consultant physician at UCLH where I am on call for Acute Medicine every month, and provide a lot of teaching on therapeutics and drug discovery.
What qualifications and experience do you have?
MB BS
BSc (Hons), 1st class, in Neurosciences
PhD (Immunology)
CCT in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics & General (Internal) Medicine
Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (London)
I am currently Senior Medical Director for Early Clinical Development at AstraZeneca, and prior to this was Director for Discovery Medicine at GSK. I design experimental medicine studies to delineate mechanisms of therapeutics on their targets in the immune response and autoimmune disease, then Phase 1b and Phase 2 clinical development trials to understand how well these work to treat patients.
Prior to joining industry, I gained extensive experience of translational clinical science laboratory work researching acute inflammation and its resolution in healthy volunteers and patients with chronic inflammatory disease. I developed various challenge models in humans to map these responses in health and disease, and determine the impact of therapeutics. Through this work, I gained substantial experience with flow cytometry, protein assays and biochemistry, and cell fractionation and culture.
What’s the most interesting aspect of your job?
Developing new medicines is complex and challenging. Clinical pharmacologists are uniquely positioned to combine an understanding of patients with knowledge of chemistry and biology to produce novel, efficient and robust strategies for identifying new drug targets, and turning molecules into therapeutics in the clinic, for patients. I have always loved working at the interface between clinical medicine and laboratory science, and feel very privileged to work in a field where I can play a major role in delivering new therapeutics for disease areas where there is substantial unmet need.
What are your research interests?
- Immunoinflammatory and autoimmune diseases
- The physiology of acute inflammation and inflammation resolution
- Immunoinflammation
- Drug safety and toxicology
What one piece of advice would you give to someone seeking a career in clinical pharmacology?
Pursue the areas of medicine and science that interest and motivate you, and find good mentors.