Ed J. Griffen obtained his Ph.D. from Imperial College, London, and undertook postdoctoral research at the University of Waterloo-Kitchener, Canada. He joined Zeneca Pharmaceuticals as a team leader in medicinal chemistry working in the CNS, infection, oncology, and chemical biology areas.

During a secondment into the computational chemistry group, he co-developed matched molecular pair tools to quantify medicinal chemistry approaches. In 2012 he was a cofounder of MedChemica Ltd where he remains as a Technical Director. He is a named inventor on 16 patents and coauthored more than 24 articles, book chapters, and a textbook. He has worked on 4 projects that have entered clinical development. He is currently medicinal chemistry team leader on the Open Science COVID Moonshot project.