Experience

Edmond Differding, Owner and Managing Director of Differding Consulting has an extensive experience in drug discovery

He studied chemistry and received his Ph.D. from the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium), followed by post-doctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge (Massachusetts, USA).

He started his industrial career at the Central Research Laboratories of Ciba-Geigy AG (now Novartis) in Basel, before joining UCB Pharma in Belgium as Head of Chemical Research. Following the acquisitions by UCB of Celltech (UK) and Schwarz Pharma (Germany) he became Vice President Global Chemistry, in charge of three discovery chemistry teams in the therapeutic areas of central nervous system diseases, inflammation and oncology.

He subsequently became UCB’s Vice President Scientific Affairs, based in Mumbai (India) where he was in charge of identifying and initiating drug discovery collaborations with Indian companies. His track record includes several compounds that reached or currently are in clinical development, as well as numerous preclinical candidate nominations.

In 2010, he left UCB and started his own consultancy activities.

He is Board of Administration Member of the Fonds National de la Recherche, Luxembourg; International Advisory Board Member of ChemMedChem, and Editorial Board Member of Drug Discovery Today: Technologies

In addition he currently serves as Council member of the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC), and as President of the Medicinal Chemistry Division of the Société Royale de Chimie (SRC), Belgium, of which he is a Past President