Professor Charlotte Deane MBE

Professor of Structural Bioinformatics

About

I lead the Oxford Protein Informatics Group (OPIG), a research group of over 20 people working on diverse problems across immunoinformatics, protein structure and small molecule drug discovery; using statistics, AI and computation to generate biological and medical insight.

I am currently the Chief Scientist of Biologics AI at Exscientia and co-director of the Systems Approaches to Biomedical Research Centre for Doctoral Training which I founded in 2009.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I served on SAGE, the UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies and acted as UK Research and Innovation’s COVID-19 Response Director.

I have  held numerous senior roles at the University of Oxford and until recently was the Deputy Executive Chair of the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

In the 2022 Birthday Honours, I was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to COVID-19 research.

Research Interests

My research covers several areas in protein structure prediction and protein interaction networks, combining both theoretical work and empirical analyses. We work on developing novel methodologies to understand and predict protein evolution, interaction, structure and function. Our work is focussed in the four main areas listed below:

  • Protein structure
  • Immunoinformatics
  • Biological Networks
  • Small molecules

In OPIG, we develop novel algorithms, tools and databases that are openly available to the community. These tools are widely used web resources and are also part of several Pharma drug discovery pipelines.

For more information about the research and members of the Oxford Protein Informatics Group, see our group web pages. A list of all software developed in my group can also be found here.

Career History

  • Professor, Department of Statistics, University of Oxford (2008 - present)
  • Chief Scientist of Biologics AI at Exscientia (2021 - present)
  • Deputy Executive Chair of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (2019 - 2021)
  • Scientific Expert, Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) (2021)
  • COVID Response Director, UK Research and Innovation (2020 – December 2021)
  • Head of Department of Statistics (2015 - 2019)
  • Deputy Head of the Mathematical Physical and Life Sciences (MPLS) Division (2018 - 2020)
  • Associate Head (Research) of MPLS Division (2014 - 2019)
  • Associate Head (Impact and Innovation) of MPLS Division (2013 – 2014)
  • Director - Systems Approaches to Biomedical Research Centre for Doctoral Training (2009 - present)
  • Director - Systems Biology Doctoral Training Centre (2007 – 2009)
  • University Lecturer, Department of Statistics, University of Oxford (2002 - 2008)
  • Welcome Trust Research Fellow, University of California Los Angeles (2000 - 2002)

Publications

Vales, S., Kryukova, J., Chandra, S., Smagurauskaite, G., Payne, M., Clark, C., Hafner, K., Mburu, P., Denisov, S., Davies, G., Outeiral, C., Deane, C., Morris, G. and Bhattacharya, S. (2023) “Discovery and pharmacophoric characterization of chemokine network inhibitors using phage-display, saturation mutagenesis and computational modelling”, Nature Communications, 14(1).
Carbery, A., Buttenschoen, M., Skyner, R., von Delft, F. and Deane, C. (2023) “Learnt representations of proteins can be used for accurate prediction of small molecule binding sites on experimentally determined and predicted protein structures”, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Huhn, A., Nissley, D., Wilson, D., Kutuzov, M., Donat, R., Tan, T., Zhang, Y., Barton, M., Liu, C., Dejnirattisai, W., Supasa, P., Mongkolsapaya, J., Townsend, A., James, W., Screaton, G., van der Merwe, P., Deane, C., Isaacson, S. and Dushek, O. (2023) “The molecular reach of antibodies determines their SARS-CoV-2 neutralisation potency”, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Crook, O., Gittens, N., Chung, C.-W. and Deane, C. (2023) “A Functional Bayesian Model for Hydrogen-Deuterium Exchange Mass Spectrometry.”, Journal of proteome research, 22(9), pp. 2959–2972.
Buttenschoen, M., Morris, G. and Deane, C. (2023) “PoseBusters: AI-based docking methods fail to generate physically valid poses or generalise to novel sequences.”
Gordon, G., Capel, H., Guloglu, B., Richardson, E., Stafford, R. and Deane, C. (2023) “A comparison of the binding sites of antibodies and single-domain antibodies”, Frontiers in Immunology, 14.
Olsen, T., Abanades, B., Moal, I. and Deane, C. (2023) “KA-Search, a method for rapid and exhaustive sequence identity search of known antibodies”, Scientific Reports, 13(1).
Klarner, L., Rudner, T., Reutlinger, M., Schindler, T., Morris, G., Deane, C. and Teh, Y. (2023) “Drug Discovery under Covariate Shift with Domain-Informed Prior Distributions over Functions.”
Wills, S., Sanchez-Garcia, R., Dudgeon, T., Roughley, S., Merritt, A., Hubbard, R., Davidson, J., von Delft, F. and Deane, C. (2023) “Fragment Merging Using a Graph Database Samples Different Catalogue Space than Similarity Search.”, Journal of chemical information and modeling, 63(11), pp. 3423–3437.
Abanades Kenyon, B., Wong, W., Boyles, F., Georges, G., Bujotzek, A. and Deane, C. (2023) “ImmuneBuilder: Deep-Learning models for predicting the structures of immune proteins”, Communications Biology, 6.

Media

Contact

College affiliation: Fellow at St Anne's College

Email:  deane@stats.ox.ac.uk

Phone number (Department): +44 (0)1865 272860

Phone number (Direct): +44 (0)1865 281301 

Office number: 2.16

PA:  Lauren Haynes

Current Research Students

Tobias Hegelund Olsen

Martin Buttenschoen

Leo Klarner

Sarah Robinson

Lewis Chinery

Anna Carbery

Lucy Vost

Brennan Abanades Kenyon

Research Groups

Oxford Protein Informatics Group

Computational Biology and Bioinformatics

Computational Statistics and Machine Learning

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