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.  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.

From 2010 to 2019, he was Board of Administration Member of the “Fonds National de la Recherche (FNR)” in Luxembourg. He has served as Editorial Board Member of Drug Discovery Today: Technologies (until 2017), and as International Advisory Board Member of ChemMedChem (2006-2013).

In addition he has been President of the Medicinal Chemistry Division of the Société Royale de Chimie (SRC), Belgium (1998-2013), SRC President (2004-05), Council member of the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC) (1998-2013), EFMC Secretary (2001-2002) and EFMC Vice president (2003-2004). He has also been Titular Member of the IUPAC Division VII - Chemistry and Human Health (2014-2017), and Secretary of IUPAC’s Subcommittee on Drug Discovery and Development (2014-2017).

In 2021, he became Honorary EFMC Fellow.