Aled Edwards, SG, PhD, OC, is the Temerty Nexus Chair of Health Innovation and Technology at the University of Toronto, and Chief Executive of the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), which is perhaps the longest running and most well-known pre-competitive partnership in drug discovery. The SGC has been a pioneer in open science and does not file for patents as a core principle. Al has been involved in translating his science into impact. He founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Structure-Guided Drug Discovery Coalition, which among other projects led the 2019 Medicines for Malaria Ventures Drug Discovery Project of the Year; and co-founded Affinium Pharmaceuticals which developed the antibiotic afabicin, one of only six novel antibiotics in the global late-stage discovery pipeline, and YCharOS, which won the 2021 Irv and Helga Cooper International Open Science Prize. He was also instrumental in launching the READDI (North Carolina) and Conscience (Toronto) non-profits focused on pandemic antiviral drug discovery. He has co-authored ~230 peer-reviewed publications [h-index 80, (Google Scholar, July 2023)] and ~5,000 depositions into the Protein Data Bank. He served on the National Research Council of Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic.
