Fiona Marshall (pharmacologist) facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Fiona Marshall FRS FMedSci
Marshall speaking at the National Institutes of Health 2017 Daly lecture
Born	Fiona Hamilton Marshall
Alma mater	University of Bath (BSc) University of Cambridge (PhD)
Scientific career
Fields	Drug discovery GPCRs Neuroscience
Institutions	Novartis Merck & Co. GlaxoSmithKline
Thesis	Cholecystokinin/dopamine interactions in the rat basal ganglia (1990)
Doctoral advisor	John Hughes

Fiona Hamilton Marshall is a brilliant British scientist who helps discover new medicines. She is a top leader in the world of drug research. She even started her own company, Heptares Therapeutics, which focused on finding new ways to treat diseases. Now, she is the President of Biomedical Research at a big company called Novartis. Her amazing work has earned her special recognition, like being chosen as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Early Life and Education

Fiona loved science subjects like biology, chemistry, and physics when she was in high school. As a teenager, she won a prize at a national physics competition.

She studied biochemistry at the University of Bath and graduated with top honors in 1987. Then, she went to the University of Cambridge to study the brain and nervous system (this is called neuroscience). Her teacher there was John Hughes. Her teacher, John Hughes, worked at a research center that developed medicines. This made Fiona want to work in the pharmaceutical industry, which creates drugs to help people.

Research and Career

After getting her PhD, Fiona started working at a big medicine company called GlaxoSmithKline. She joined the team that studied how medicines affect the brain and nervous system. She worked with other scientists like Patrick Humphrey and Mike Tyers.

At GlaxoSmithKline, Fiona studied special "doorways" on cells called receptors. These receptors are activated by chemicals in our bodies, like neurotransmitters, which send messages in the brain. In 1999, after only nine years, Fiona became the Head of Molecular Pharmacology. This means she led the team that studied how medicines work at a tiny, molecular level.

Later, she moved to a group that focused on a very important type of receptor called G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). About one-third of all medicines work by targeting these GPCRs. Fiona was the first to find and describe the GABAB receptor, which is part of the GPCR family.

In 2000, another company, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, asked her to join them as their Director of Molecular Pharmacology. When her children were young, Fiona took some time away from working full-time in the pharmaceutical industry. She worked more flexibly as a consultant instead.

Founding Heptares Therapeutics

Fiona Marshall, along with Malcolm Weir, Christopher Tate, and Richard Henderson, started a company called Heptares Therapeutics. This company used new technologies developed by the Medical Research Council. These technologies helped scientists study GPCRs very closely, even seeing their exact shapes. This was important for designing new medicines.

For example, Heptares was the first to show the detailed structure of the GLP-1 receptor. This helped in developing treatments for diseases. In 2015, one of the cancer medicines Heptares was developing was licensed to AstraZeneca. Later that year, Heptares became part of a Japanese medicine company called Sosei.

Later Career

In 2018, Fiona joined Merck & Co as the Head of their UK Discovery Research Centre. Here, she focused on diseases that affect people as they get older. In 2019, she became the Global Head of Neuroscience Discovery, leading efforts to find new treatments for brain conditions. After two years in that role, she was promoted to Senior Vice President of Discovery, Preclinical & Translational Medicine Research. In 2022, she became the President of Biomedical Research at Novartis, a very big role where she leads a lot of important science work.

Awards and Honours

• 2012 WISE Campaign award for Innovation and Entrepreneurship
• 2015 Royal Society of Chemistry Malcolm Campbell Award
• 2016 Elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci)
• 2016 Honorary degree at the University of Bath
• 2018 Vane Medal from the British Pharmacological Society
• 2018 Honorary Fellow of British Pharmacological Society
• 2021 Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS)