Dr Dominic Williams

The Unit's Affiliated Memberships aim to facilitate or enhance long-term collaborations between scientists and experts from across the world with the MRC Toxicology Unit and its groups. Affiliated Members are linked to a group and provide the Affiliates with access to the Unit, its expertise and wider opportunities, making them highly valued members of the Unit's research community.

Dominic joined AstraZeneca in 2014 and is Senior Director within Clinical Pharmacology & Safety Science (CPSS, Cambridge UK), the Preclinical Hepatic Target Organ Lead. He was the co-ordinator of the IMI1 consortium, MIP-DILI, and has been part of other EU initiatives (SAFE-T, SafeSciMET). Prior to joining AstraZeneca Dr Williams led a very productive and impactful academic toxicology science career. Starting in the laboratory of Professor Kevin Park at the University of Liverpool and ultimately becoming an internationally recognised principal investigator of hepatic toxicology in his own right. Dr Williams has been the recipient of 38 funding grants, supervised 18 PhD and 6 Masters students to completion and co-led the successful University of Liverpool bid to become the MRC Centre for Drug Safety Science. Dr Williams is well known for his leading hepatic safety science and has presented and chaired sessions at national (British Toxicology Society & British Pharmacology Society) and international conferences (Eurotox, Society of Toxicology), published +150 scientific papers (including high impact journals: Nature journals, Science Translational Medicine and Annual Reviews of Pharmacology & Toxicology), led a number of Committees within the British Toxicology Society and acted as Toxicology Expert for an MHRA committee. 

Dr Williams joined AstraZeneca in 2014 with the aim of translating his academic expertise into the pharma industry to optimise drug hepatic safety. Dr Williams implemented a completely new AstraZeneca hepatic safety strategy: combining advanced in vitro models, drug pharmacokinetics, and physico-chemical and ADME parameters with Bayesian machine learning to derive at more quantitative hepatic toxicology risk assessment with the work published and the approach being adopted by others in this field. This strategy has now been successfully deployed for all candidate drug investment decisions (a key milestone) since 2017. Dr Williams is Senior Director of the AstraZeneca hepatic safety team of scientists, students and post-doctoral researchers, designing bespoke hepatic safety solutions for >100 low molecular weight chemical projects (small molecules, covalent inhibitors, new modalities, dendrimers, ADC and PROTACs) and exploring new methods and drug toxicity investigations. More recently Dr Williams has integrated in vitro transcriptomic and metabolic data with clinical biomarker data and together with quantitative systems pharmacology has been able to translate drug mechanisms of action, from the lab to the clinic. Another example of his leadership of quantitative and dynamic hepatic toxicology. Dr Williams enjoys mentoring the next generation of scientists and early talent within his own lab but also more broadly across AstraZeneca and has been the vice-chair for the AstraZeneca R&D Post-doc committee. He has been our safety organisation representative for last 9 years and during this time he has successfully secured +40 safety science post-doc awards