Optibrium: Ian Smith becomes Chief Technology Officer

Optibrium, a developer of software and AI solutions for drug discovery, has announced the appointment of Ian Smith as Chief Technology Officer (CTO), the latest in a number of senior-level hires for the company.

With over 25 years of biopharma experience, Smith will oversee the development of the company’s technology portfolio and cloud services and guide the team’s growth to support the continued expansion of the company’s global customer base. This latest hire marks a key milestone for Optibrium as it enters the next phase of commercial growth as a provider of innovative computational and AI drug discovery technologies.

As CTO, Smith will lead the Software Engineering, DevOps and Quality Assurance teams, driving the scale-up of the Company’s infrastructure and managing the expanding portfolio of products and development projects.

Smith joins Optibrium having previously served as Head of Technology and Delivery for an insurance technology start-up, Hx—part of the Howden Group—where he developed innovative data, analytics and digital application-focused strategies through cloud platform delivery, as well as defining a target operating model to implement the Group’s data transformation and growth objectives.

Prior to this, he worked at Merck, Sharp and Dohme (MSD), holding positions including Director of Research and Development Analytics, Director of IT Productivity and Director of Scientific Modelling & Real-World Data.

During his tenure as Director R&D Analytics, Smith led a team to define, develop and execute an 18-month strategy to build Merck’s next-generation machine learning and AI-driven analytics platform and data science capabilities to mature research and develop scientific insights.