Prof. Ashok Venkitaraman

Professor Ashok Venkitaraman is an Indian-born, Cambridge-based cancer biologist, academic leader and co-founder of PhoreMost, the Cambridge biopharmaceutical company developing drugs for targets previously considered undruggable. He holds the Ursula Zoellner Professorship of Cancer Research at the University of Cambridge and serves as Director of the MRC Cancer Unit, one of the world's foremost centres for cancer biology and drug discovery. He also directs the Centre for Chemical Biology and Therapeutics at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, maintaining deep ties with India's scientific community.

Ashok is internationally recognised for his contributions to understanding the genetics and biology of cancer — in particular for elucidating how genome instability drives carcinogenesis and shapes the response to cancer therapy. His research has been transformative in defining how BRCA2 mutations create vulnerabilities in cancer cells, foundational work that underpins a class of drugs now used to treat breast, ovarian and pancreatic cancers. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and a member of the EMBO European academy.

In 2014, Ashok co-founded PhoreMost alongside Dr Chris Torrance and Dr Grahame McKenzie, commercialising his laboratory's SITESEEKER technology — a phenotypic screening platform that can systematically unmask cryptic druggable sites across the entire human proteome. PhoreMost has raised £2.5 million in seed funding, an £11 million Series A and a £33 million Series B, and is advancing a PLK1 inhibitor programme for brain cancer towards clinical trials.