The Institute of Chemical Biology (ICB) was created more than 15 years ago with the sole focus of addressing the challenges facing healthcare in the world. Since then it has broadened its scope to encompass several more sectors including personal care, agrisciences and drug discovery.

The ICB's mission is to develop and foster links between our community of physical and life scientists, engineers and clinicians, harnessing their multidisciplinarity to develop novel tools and techniques to solve outstanding challenges in biological and biomedical sciences. The Institute integrates researchers and capabilities from all areas of the College necessary to tackle these new challenges.

It has a research focus in areas of particular strategic importance to the UK. This includes new tools for discovering biomarkers, which are indicators of disease, as well as developing new drug delivery systems. Its cross-disciplinary approach draws together a dynamic network of scientists from over 100 research groups.

Support for multidisciplinary postgraduate training is one of the most important priorities of the Institute, which incorporates a pioneering EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT). The mission of the CDT is to train postgraduate researchers for work at the interface of the physical and life sciences, producing researchers with expertise and understanding that spans both fields, and training a next generation of scientists. Supporting this aim, every student in the CDT has at least two supervisors, one from the physical sciences and one from the life sciences, with over 200 supervisors involved.