Philip Dean moved to the University of Cambridge in 1967 to work for a PhD on biophysical correlations in cell secretions at the Department of Pharmacology. He has spent 33 years of his working life within the university, much of it with funding from the Wellcome Trust. The last ten years at the university were linked to research contracts with Rhone-Poulenc (Rhone-Poulenc Rorer) (Aventis) where his team was responsible for the development of novel algorithms in biomolecular structural problems, principally molecular similarity in drug design.
The research at Cambridge University culminated with a large grant from Rhone-Poulenc to develop novel technologies for drug design to handle the expected avalanche of genomic material. In 2000 Philip's research team was spun out of the University into De Novo Pharmaceuticals where today he is co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer. De Novo has developed enabling technologies for massive optimisation problems in drug design using both automated structure generation, advanced docking methods and extended pharmacophore approaches. These technologies are integrated into a platform that handles both structure-based and ligand-based design 
