Rate My Professor Ed Tate

Professor Ed Tate holds the GSK Chair in Chemical Biology in the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College London and serves as Satellite Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute. He directs Imperial's Centre for Drug Discovery Science and the MRes programme in Drug Discovery and Development. Tate earned a BSc in Chemistry from the University of Durham and a PhD in organic chemistry and methodology from the University of Cambridge in 2000 under Professor Steve Ley. His postdoctoral training included a Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Research Fellowship at Ecole Polytechnique in Paris with Professor Sam Zard and a Howard Trust Research Fellowship at the Pasteur Institute with Dr Annie Kolb. Joining Imperial College London thereafter to work on protein chemistry and chemical biology with Professor Robin Leatherbarrow, he progressed as BBSRC David Phillips Research Fellow from 2006, Senior Lecturer in 2010, Reader in Chemical Biology in 2012, and Professor of Chemical Biology in 2014. In 2017, he became Satellite Group Leader at the Crick, and in 2023 was appointed to the GSK Chair in Chemical Biology.

Tate's research focuses on chemical biology and drug discovery, developing covalent ligands, activity-based probes, photoaffinity probes, and chemical genetic systems to identify drug targets and analyse post-translational modifications such as myristoylation, palmitoylation, prenylation, and S-acylation in cancer, inflammation, and infectious diseases. His group advances targeted pharmacology including PROTACs, molecular glues, and improved antibody-drug conjugates. Representative publications include 'A palmitoyl transferase chemical-genetic system to map ZDHHC-specific S-acylation' (Nature Biotechnology, 2024), 'MYC deregulation sensitizes cancer cells to N-myristoyltransferase inhibition' (Cell Reports, 2025), 'Discovery and validation of a novel class of necroptosis inhibitors targeting RIPK1' (ACS Chemical Biology, 2025), and 'Spatiotemporally resolved GPCR interactome uncovers unique mediators of receptor agonism' (Cell Chemical Biology, 2025). Awards include the Corday-Morgan Prize (2020), Sir David Cooksey Translation Prize (2019), Cancer Research UK Programme Foundation Award (2015), Norman Heatley Award (2014), MedImmune Protein and Peptide Science Award (2013), and Wain Medal (2012). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) and Royal Society of Biology (FRSB), Tate co-founded spinouts Myricx Pharma, which raised £90 million for cancer drugs, and Siftr Bio for ADC technologies; he was named Imperial Enterprise Academic Entrepreneur of the Year in 2025.