Dr Henney has a PhD in Medicine and many years’ academic research experience, studying cardiovascular disease at the pathological, cellular, molecular and genetic level in laboratories in London, Cambridge and Oxford. He then moved into industry, spending 13 years with AstraZeneca. Ultimately, leading global programs exploring strategic improvements aimed at reducing drug failure in development, he created and headed a new department that focused on pathway mapping and modelling, which evolved to establish the practice of Systems Biology, supporting projects in discovery and development. Dr Henney has extensive experience in directing and managing large, complex teams across disciplinary, cultural and geographic boundaries, latterly in the area of Systems Biology and Systems Medicine. His experience in this area led to an invitation to direct the major €50M German national flagship program, The Virtual Liver Network.
Following the end of the VLN Program, Dr Henney was elected to be part-time Executive Director of the Virtual Physiological Human Institute, a not-for-profit organization promoting the use of computational modelling and simulation to interpret quantitative biological information and understand the dynamics of biological and physiological function. As part of that role, he was responsible for establishing a new partnership with industry, The Avicenna Alliance for Predictive Medicine, a not-for-profit organization that focuses on developing a policy framework supporting the use of in silico technologies in medicine, and of which he is now Secretary General.
