Ben Lehner

Ben Lehner is Head of Generative and Synthetic Genomics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, and Honorary Professor of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge. He also is ICREA Professor of Systems and Synthetic Biology, at the CRG in Barcelona, Spain.
With his research, Lehner seeks to lay the foundations for programmable predictive biology by solving some of biology's most intractable problems. By developing experiments that can be run at scale and high-throughput, he is building the reference atlases and predictive models needed to understand how changes in DNA affect how proteins and RNAs function. His goal is to help generate the next wave of human genetics, drug discovery and bioengineering.

Lehner obtained his PhD from the university of Cambridge and became interested in understanding how mutations interact and using genetic interactions to understand biology during his postdoc at the Sanger Institute working with Andy Fraser. In 2006, he started his own lab at the new EMBL-CRG Systems Biology Research Unit in Barcelona.

At the end of 2023, he co-founded spin-off ALLOX together with Júlia Domingo, Pablo Baeza and Andre Faure. The company is developing a proprietary platform technology to design new drugs targeting protein allosteric sites to treat cancer and potentially many other diseases.