Aled Edwards is a Canadian structural biologist. He is also the Director and CEO of the international Structural Genomics Consortium and is Banbury Professor at the Banting and Best Department of Medical Research, the University of Toronto, Canada. Edwards has been a leader in the field of structural biology since the 1990s. He is involved with a number of research groups around the world focused on solving 3D protein structures. His work has led to hundreds of protein structures which are publicly accessible at the Protein Data Bank.
Edwards received his Ph.D. degree in biochemistry at McGill University in 1988 and conducted post-doctoral research in the laboratory of Prof. Roger Kornberg at Stanford University, 2006 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry.
While most structural biologists pursue structures of individual proteins or protein groups, specialists in structural proteomics, such as Edwards, pursue structures of proteins on a proteome wide scale. This implies large scale cloning, expression and purification. One main advantage of this approach is economy of scale. On the other hand, the scientific value of some resultant structures is at times questioned. Put another way, while the average cost of a protein structure is less than that incurred in a lab pursuing a small number of proteins, the balance in accounting shifts if only significant structures are counted. In short, the field of structural genomics has a significant number of supporters. An interesting Science article from January 2006 analyzes the structural genomics field.
A hallmark of Edwards' research philosophy is collaboration. Recognizing that structures alone are no longer interesting, he actively seeks and in fact invites collaborators to use his structures to enable their research, whether the end goal is functional assessment or drug discovery.
With the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), Edwards and cohorts have refined their approach to one based on protein families and targets of significance, albeit still a large scale project. The number of structures and publications shows the success of this strategy. Notable SGC accomplishments include a significant number of structures of human kinases and parasite proteins, as well as multiple articles in Nature and Cell.
Edwards was also one of the founders of Affinium Pharmaceuticals, a Toronto-based structure-guided drug discovery company. Edwards also serves as a scientific advisor on the television series ReGenesis.
Edwards has also spoken out against the current state of drug discovery research, highlighting the dearth of new drugs and the increasing cost of drug development. He is a passionate advocate of open access drug discovery and proselytize against excessive IP protection, which he describes as a barrier to progress and a bottleneck in the process of finding new drugs. He also advocates an approach which utilizes academic research more in the early stages of the pipeline and focuses industrial efforts on pharmocology and clinical trials.