Nick Keen, Ph.D
Chief Scientific Officer

Nick Keen, Ph.D., is the chief scientific officer at Bicycle Therapeutics.

Nick joined Bicycle from Novartis, where for the past five years he served as the Cambridge (U.S.) Head of Oncology Research. During his tenure at Novartis, Nick was responsible for leading research from basic target identification and drug discovery through to enabling early clinical trials. Under his leadership, the group delivered multiple new therapies to the clinic, spanning the range from novel allosteric small molecule inhibitors of previously intractable targets to advanced biologic therapies. Nick’s team was also responsible for publishing many basic discoveries in cancer biology and for building industry leading platforms in whole genome scale target identification and in modeling the diversity of human clinical trials in mice.

Prior to his time at Novartis, Nick led the early lead generation group for oncology at AstraZeneca’s U.S. research site, with a particular focus on epigenetic regulation, and prior to this, held positions of increasing responsibility in AstraZeneca’s U.K. oncology research group. During his time at AstraZeneca, Nick delivered multiple agents to the clinic and was instrumental in the acquisition of KuDOS Pharmaceuticals, leading to the registration of Olaparib (a first in class PARP inhibitor) for the treatment of BRCA mutant cancers.

Nick completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Cambridge in Natural Sciences, his graduate studies with the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in Cambridge (now merged with The Cancer Research Campaign to form Cancer Research UK) and his post-doctoral studies at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.