Stephen Hitchcock, PhD, is currently chief scientific officer at Takeda - Envoy (Takeda California). He has over 17 years experience in the pharmaceutical industry and has held senior leadership positions at Envoy Therapeutics, Eli Lilly and Amgen. He earned a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Nottingham in the UK and then completed a NATO postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University.

Dr Hitchcock’s research interests have focused on developing novel therapeutics to address unmet needs in the areas of pain, and neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric diseases, as well as the design and development of PET imaging agents. Under his guidance, his research teams have delivered clinical development candidates for a number of challenging targets in the neurosciences field. He places a strong emphasis on pharmacodynamic-pharmacokinetic relationships, receptor occupancy and translational biomarkers in pre-clinical drug discovery and is a recognized expert in the area of blood-brain barrier permeability and small molecule entry into the CNS. He is an author and co-inventor on over 50 patents, patent applications, papers and review articles.