David Thurston is Emeritus Professor of Drug Discovery in the Institute of Pharmaceutical Science (IPS) at King's College London. He has a first degree in pharmacy, an MSc in Precision Medicine and a PhD in synthetic medicinal chemistry, and has worked at two schools of pharmacy in the USA (University of Texas at Austin and Kentucky Colleges of Pharmacy) and four in the UK (the Portsmouth, Nottingham, London University and King's College School of Pharmacy). David's academic research team discovered the first C8-linked sequence-selective DNA-interactive PBD dimer, analogues of which are now used as the payload component for Antibody-Drug Conjugates (ADCs) in development by a number of companies world-wide as cancer therapies (e.g., Loncastuximab teserine). David has co-founded a number of oncology biotech companies including Spirogen Ltd in 2000 (which commercialized the PBD dimers, and was acquired by AstraZeneca/Medimmune in 2013), and Femtogenix Ltd in 2015 (which works on next-generation sequence-selective DNA-interactive ADC payloads, and for which he still acts as CSO).

During his academic career, David has supervised numerous PhD students and postdoctoral research fellows, and has been the PI of several major Program Grants from funders including Cancer Research UK. He has many publications in medicinal chemistry/chemistry journals and books, and is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Drug Discovery book series of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Ilona Pysz has a first degree in Forensic Science, an MSc in Cancer Pharmacology and a PhD in Pharmaceutical Science in which she produced a number of novel Antibody-Drug Conjugates (ADCs), and developed a hydrophobicity assay which allows the physico-chemical properties of ADC payloads to be evaluated and compared. She has previously worked within the Bioanalysis and Safety Assessment (Toxicology) departments at Covance Inc (where she was responsible for overall pre-clinical study coordination of both in-house and external research projects), the drug discovery department at Femtogenix Ltd (where she worked on the development of novel ADC conjugation strategies and managed ADC development projects), and is now in a clinical research position at Medpace, Inc. Ilona has published widely in the cancer drug discovery area, has given presentations at international conferences, and is a multiple author in the Royal Society of Chemistry Drug Discovery book "Cytotoxic Payloads for Antibody-Drug Conjugates".