Dr Neil Weir is senior vice president of discovery at UCB SA and is responsible for global discovery and overseeing an integrated portfolio of small molecule and antibody therapeutic projects in the areas of Immunology and Neurology. He was one of the inventors of the drug Cimzia®, a novel pegylated anti-TNF.
Prior to his role at UCB, Dr Weir was head of discovery at Celltech R and D in the UK and was involved in the discovery and development of antibody and antibody fragment-based drugs. He is a member of the Research Directors Group of EFPIA (The European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations) and has sponsored three call topics in the European Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI).
Dr Weir is a member of the MRC Translational Research Group and the HealthTech and Medicines KTN Steering Board, a member of the MRC’s Stratified Medicine Steering Group, and chair of the industry advisory panel for UCL vision course for senior executive training for the BioIndustries.
He holds a Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Biology from Edinburgh University and a PhD from the Institute of Biotechnology (University of Kent at Canterbury) studying metabolic flux through amino acid biosynthesis pathways.
