Pravin Mahajan
Associate Director, Discovery Technologies Astex Pharmaceuticals
Pravin Mahajan is an Associate Director in the Discovery Technologies group at Astex Pharmaceuticals. Astex uses a fragment-based screening approach, which employs X-ray crystallography and cryo-EM and a range of additional biophysical methods including NMR, SPR, DSF and ITC to guide projects from hit identification to lead optimisation. Pravin’s work focuses on applying protein biochemistry and biophysical methods to support drug discovery programmes.
Before joining Astex, Pravin spent nearly eight years at the Structural Genomics Consortium at the University of Oxford, where he worked on protein science and structure-based approaches to understand protein biochemistry.
Seminars
Thursday 14th January 2027
Unlocking Faster Drug Discovery with Cryo-EM: From Difficult Targets to Actionable Structures
11:30 am
- Accelerate structure-based drug discovery by implementing streamlined cryo-EM workflows that can deliver near-atomic-resolution structures in weeks, enabling faster iteration from target validation to lead optimisation
- Expand the range of druggable targets by applying cryo-EM to membrane proteins, multiprotein assemblies, and other challenging systems that are difficult or impossible to study using traditional crystallography
- Build a cost-effective cryo-EM strategy by addressing the realities of large-scale data processing, storage, and compute demands. Explore hybrid cloud and on-premise approaches, infrastructure optimization, and total cost-of-ownership considerations for biotech teams
