Matt Clark
President and Chief Scientific Officer, X-Chem
Matt Clark received his BS in biochemistry from the University of California, San Diego, gained a PhD in chemistry from Cornell University, and conducted postdoctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is considered a world-recognized innovator and leader in the DNA-encoded library (DEL) field. He was part of X-Chem’s founding team and served as VP of chemistry and SVP of research prior to his appointment to CEO. Now operating in the role of CSO, Clark has helped the company develop from a niche chemical discovery platform to a drug discovery engine serving the biopharma industry. Before joining X-Chem, Clark was director of chemistry at GlaxoSmithKline, where he led the group responsible for the design and synthesis of early-iteration DELs. He began his professional career at Praecis Pharmaceuticals, where he played a key role in the early development and implementation of technologies that would become the basis for DEL. He has numerous patents and key DEL publications to his name.
“Experimental design in the future will need to be very meticulous and robust, since systemic biases in our data streams will lead to poor predictive modeling. If we do it right, well-designed and high-throughput data flows will lead to non-intuitive predictions that can leapfrog our current paradigm of drug discovery.”
