John G. Houston, Ph.D. most recently served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Arvinas, where he also previously held the roles of President of Research & Development and Chief Scientific Officer. After joining Arvinas in 2017, Dr. Houston led the company to its 2018 IPO and raised over $2 billion through private funding, partnerships, strategic collaborations, and follow-on financings. Under his leadership, Arvinas progressed multiple investigational programs into clinical development, reported the first positive pivotal results for a PROTAC degrader, and demonstrated central nervous system pharmacodynamic activity for an orally administered PROTAC. The company also earned FDA approval for vepdegestrant (Veppanu), the first approved PROTAC protein degrader.

Prior to Arvinas, Dr. Houston spent more than 18 years at Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS), where he rose to Senior Vice President of Specialty Discovery. He held accountability for all Discovery Biology disease teams and various Discovery technology departments, served on the BMS R&D Executive Leadership team, and chaired the Target Portfolio Committee. Together with his teams and research colleagues, he progressed over 200 compounds into early development, several of which advanced into late-stage clinical trials and toward commercialization. Before joining BMS, he served as Head of the Lead Discovery Unit at Glaxo Wellcome Research and Development in the UK.

Dr. Houston currently serves on the boards of Arvinas, NextCure, Inc., and Cybrexa Therapeutics. He holds a B.Sc. in Medical Microbiology from Glasgow University and a Ph.D. in Microbial Biochemistry from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, and completed his postdoctoral studies on an MRC grant at Glasgow University.