Cresset sets up Professional Services division

Cresset, a UK developer of specialist software for calculating and comparing the characteristics of chemical compounds, has set up a new Professional Services division and has appointed Dr Martin Slater as its new director of consulting.

Slater joins the Welwyn Garden City firm from BioFocus where, as senior research fellow, he underpinned the SoftFocus library brand with the development of innovative chemogenomic tools and the design of more than 40 commercially successful protein targeted libraries.

Slater has 14 years’ experience in the pharmaceutical ‘fee for service’ environment in which he supported medicinal chemistry and a diverse range of programmes. After studying medicinal chemistry at the Universities of Huddersfield and Leeds, he joined the then start-up company BioFocus in 1997. He pioneered the use of Cresset’s field-based technologies at BioFocus for targets including GPCRs, kinases, ion channels and proteases for library generation and de-novo ligand design.