Neil Castle is Vice President of Research.  Prior to spinning out of Pfizer in 2015, Icagen was part of Pfizer’s Pain and sensory disorders research unit where Dr Castle was Director of Biology and a member of the research unit leadership team. Dr Castle was the research project leader for Pfizer’s preclinical Nav1.7 program, which led the industry in the development of the first truly subtype selective small molecule inhibitors targeting a previously unknown interaction site on one of the voltage sensor domains. During his tenure at Pfizer, Dr Castle also led a team that successfully stably expressed and a ran a drug candidate discovery campaign against this historically challenging Nav1.9 sodium channel, which is currently receiving considerable interest as a potential target for new pain therapies due to human genetic pain disorders being recently associated with mutations if this channel. Prior to its acquisition by Pfizer in 2011, Dr Castle served as Director of Biology and Senior Research Advisor of Icagen for more than a decade, participating in and/or leading a broad spectrum of ion channel focused drug discovery programs targeting neuroexcitatory, cardiovascular and immune/inflammatory disorders. Prior to Icagen, Dr Castle spent 8 years at Harvard Medical School, first as a Post-Doctoral Fellow and then as an Assistant Professor. Dr Castle received his BSc and PhD in Pharmacology from University College London. Dr Castle also currently serves on the Scientific Advisory Board for the NIH CounterAct Program at UC Davis. He has over 40 scientific publications and is co-inventor of five patents.

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