Malcolm led a structure-based design group for ten years at Novartis before taking up the chair of Structural Biochemistry at Edinburgh University in 1995.
For five years he was seconded to the company Cyclacel where structure-based approaches were successfully used to identify and develop a kinase inhibitor which is currently in clinical trials. Over the last ten years he has held consultancies with Roche, Novartis and Debiopharm. Malcolm is Director of The Centre for Translational and Chemical Biology which he founded with support from Scottish Enterprise and the Wellcome Trust. He currently leads a research team of 14 PhD students and research fellows studying a number of biologically and medically important targets including immunophilins and other chaperones. Other major scientific interests include studies on allosteric mechanism and molecular recognition. He has over 200 publications on these topics. Malcolm trained as a chemist before gaining a PhD in Structural Biology from the University of Edinburgh.