Dr Godwin Aleku is a Senior Lecturer in Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery within the Institute of Pharmaceutical Science in the School of Cancer and Pharmaceutical Sciences at King's College London.

Dr Aleku worked initially as a clinical pharmacist with a focus on infectious diseases and later as a senior regulatory affairs officer with the (Nigerian) National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control. He moved to the UK as a postgraduate student and completed an MSc in Biotechnology and Enterprise in 2013 at the University of Exeter.

Dr Godwin Aleku is a Senior Lecturer in Chemical Biology within the School of Cancer and Pharmaceutical Sciences at King’s College London.

Dr Aleku obtained a PhD in Chemical Biology from the University of Manchester in 2017 under the supervision of Professor Nicholas Turner FRS. From 2017 to early 2020, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology in the group of Professor David Leys. In mid-2020, he joined the University of Cambridge as a Leverhulme/Isaac Newton Trust Early Career Research Fellow in Professor Florian Hollfelder’s laboratory within the Department of Biochemistry, while also serving as a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge. During this period, he was also a visiting EMBO New Venture Fellow, spending three months in Professor Roland Riek’s laboratory at ETH Zurich.

Dr Aleku joined King’s College London in November 2022, where he leads interdisciplinary research focused on developing clean, enzyme-based, sustainable methods for pharmaceutical synthesis and advancing the application of biocatalysis in drug discovery. His research employs multidisciplinary approaches at the interface of organic chemistry, industrial biotechnology, and early-stage drug discovery.

His pioneering work on the discovery and characterisation of Reductive Aminases (RedAms), together with subsequent advances in RedAm-catalysed reductive amination, was recognised with the Royal Society Horizon Prize (Chemistry–Biology Interface) in 2021. His recent research has been supported through grants and fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust and the Royal Society, and he was awarded an EPSRC New Investigator Award in 2024.

Current Research Focus

The Aleku Biocatalysis and Enzyme Engineering Group’s research is organised into two main themes:

A. Biocatalyst Discovery, Mechanism, Design, and Engineering for Pharmaceutical Synthesis

We are particularly interested in investigating sequence–function relationship landscapes to accelerate biocatalyst discovery and enzyme engineering. Using this approach, we aim to expand the biocatalytic toolbox by developing novel enantiodivergent amine-forming reactions, as well as efficient regioselective C–H functionalisation of aromatic compounds through CO₂ fixation.

B. Functional Group Chemistry as a Model for the Inhibition of Enzyme Drug Targets

We are investigating whether certain privileged medicinal scaffolds can be exploited as multitarget inhibitors of therapeutically relevant enzymes in kinetoplastid protozoan parasites. We are also investigating this concept for multi-target modulation of neuropharmacological drug targets.