Laura Cleghorn is a Reader in the Drug Discovery Unit (DDU) within the University of Dundee’s Faculty of Life Sciences. Laura joined the DDU at its inception in 2006 as a medicinal chemist and has led the Tuberculosis Drug Discovery portfolio since 2020. In this role, Laura leads multidisciplinary and international collaborations to identify and optimise novel chemical entities targeting tuberculosis. She has developed highly specialised expertise in advancing screening hits into optimised lead compounds.
This work has addressed the unique challenges of bacterial drug discovery, enabling the successful translation of early hits into viable development candidates, including the delivery of a preclinical candidate for tuberculosis in 2025.
Laura obtained a BSc (Hons) from the University of Edinburgh and a PhD from the University of Leeds (UK).