Simon Cruwys Ph.D is head of the Innovative Medicines Unit (IMU) with Grunenthal R&D. Based in Aachen, Germany but with recently opened Innovation Hubs in Leiden and Boston, the IMU is responsible for search and development activities in pain, new technologies and niche diseases, including fibrosis. The IMU fosters a collaborative, cluster-based, approach to building disease knowledge and improve probability of success via a network of external providers.

He was previously a Team Leader in Bioscience at AstraZeneca R&D Charnwood. His team provided in vitro and in vivo pre-clinical support for a number of projects within the Respiratory and Inflammation area. As a Project Leader, he co-ordinated the progression of candidate drugs from early Discovery through to early stage Development (First Time in Man).

Yaa is currently working as a Senior Projects and Programme Manager at BTG International; a global specialist healthcare company bringing to market innovative products in specialist areas of medicine to better serve doctors and their patients. Yaa joined BTG International 11 years ago and has provided project management leadership to a variety of projects in early phase clinical development, through to late stage, commercial launches and marked product life cycle management.

Prior to BTG, Yaa worked in projects & programme management roles at other scientific / non-scientific organisations including the Wellcome Trust, DEFRA and FSA, developing expertise in all stages of project oversight from initiating projects, planning, monitoring and controlling, risk and budget management through to successful delivery and benefits realisation. Yaa has a BSc in Biological Sciences from University of Westminster, an MSc in Science Communication from Imperial College London and holds a Six Sigma Lean Green belt. She is member of the Project Management Institute (PMi) and utilises best practice project management methodology for in person and virtual team management with internal cross functional teams and CRO relationship maintenance. 

Simon Pointon is an Associate Principal Scientist within Chemical Development at AstraZeneca. He is currently working as API Technical Lead for the on-market support of two major oncology medicines. Technical management of APIs for marketed products is a diverse role, collaborating closely with contract manufacturing organisations. Typically, areas such as technical transfer of processes, change and deviation management, and process optimisation identification and implementation are covered.

Prior to his current role, Simon led the technical development and commercial implementation of API processes for an oncology medicine that followed a significantly accelerated development path. Simon has a BSc in Chemistry from the University of Birmingham and is currently studying for the APICS Certified Supply Chain Professional qualification. He lives in Macclesfield with his wife and three children.

Richard is the Managing Director of XenoGesis Ltd, a rapidly growing contract research organisation based in BioCity Nottingham.

Founded in 2011, XenoGesis is now the UK’s largest independent contract research organisation and specialises in preclinical drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics (DMPK), quantitative bioanalysis, in vitro pharmacology, expert interpretation, and modelling and simulation.

Having joined Astra Charnwood in 1997 within Discovery DMPK, Richard progressed to Group and Project Leader at AstraZeneca. During that time Richard gained and developed an in-depth knowledge of all aspects of in vitro and in vivo drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics from Hit identification to candidate drug nomination and beyond.

Richard gained a first class honours degree in chemistry with awards for the best performance in every year, followed by a medicinal chemistry PhD with a Wellcome Trust scholarship at the University of Leicester and two subsequent postdoctoral positions at the Welsh School of Pharmacy. He has authored and co-authored twenty one publications to date and in 2014, Richard was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Rob has over 30 years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry. He started his career in production support roles with Warner Lambert and GSK before spending time in academia as a Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, where his research work involved the development of novel drug delivery systems. For the last 15 years Rob has worked in the contract pharmaceutical development sector, holding senior technical roles with Quay Pharma, Capsugel and Penn Pharma. He is currently Chief Technical Officer with Juniper Pharma Services.  He maintains a keen interest in drug delivery and its challenges, with a particular focus on oral delivery of poorly soluble compounds.

Dr van den Dries leads the European R&D team in the development of innovative softgel formulations, processes and technologies. He is an expert in the formulation of poorly soluble compounds and self-emulsifying drug delivery systems with experience spanning the entire solid dosage form development cycle.

Prof Steve Anderton is Founder and Chief Scientific Officer for Aquila BioMedical Ltd., which is based at Edinburgh’s BioQuarter campus. Steve is an internationally recognised and leading immunologist, with 120+ publications in the fields of T cell activation, T cell tolerance, Treg biology and immunotherapy in autoimmune and allergic diseases, and in cancer. This expertise underpins Aquila’s innovative approach, allowing the company to develop novel and innovative in vitro and in vivo immune assays to accelerate and improve the efficiency of the immune-oncology drug discovery pipeline. Aquila’s services are in high global demand to further the development of the next generation of cancer immunotherapies. Steve combines his Aquila role with his academic role as Professor of Therapeutic Immunology at the University of Edinburgh, where he leads a research theme at the MRC Centre for Inflammation Research.

Arnaud Tiberghien is a Senior Scientist at Spirogen, a fully owned subsidiary of AstraZeneca-Medimmune. Arnaud is lead chemist on the tesirine program, originally developing the synthetic route, followed by management of manufacturing campaigns for Spirogen and licensees such as ADC Therapeutics. In this endeavour, a robust supply chain had to be established with contract manufacturing organisations to scale-up the 31 steps synthesis, eventually delivering quantities of GMP-material large enough to support multiple phase I clinical trials.

As well as technical management of pyrrolobenzodiazepine payloads synthetic campaigns, Arnaud is an integral member of the chemistry research team, with current interests in payloads design and properties optimisation. Arnaud has a PhD in medicinal chemistry from UCL, School of Pharmacy.

VP In Vitro pharmacology at Evotec, based in Hamburg, where I have been since 2002, leading activities principally in the CNS and ion channel space providing drug development expertise alongside in vivo and medicinal chemistry functions to progress compounds into preclinical development. I am a biochemist by training with PhD gained at Warwick university. More recently, in the context of my drug discovery expertise, I am supporting the development of academic collaborations, working closely with academic experts to realise and shape new opportunities towards eventual spinout formation.

Richard is a Senior Manager in the Pharma/Biotech team at Oxford University Innovation, where he specialises in evaluation of early-stage technology, IP out-licencing and the formation of new spinout companies (including sourcing and negotiating investment agreements).  He has negotiated numerous licences and option agreements with large industry partners, and led the formation of several new spinout companies, raising several £m in funding. He also has a strong interest in novel public private partnerships to bridge the translational funding gap. Richard has a PhD in Genetics from Cambridge.

Paul Quinn has 20 years' Clinical Development experience with a recent focus on Clinical Operations, currently Director – Clinical Operations, at Vectura an SME pharmaceutical company specialising in inhaled therapies.  Paul has worked in the Pharma industry previously at Pfizer and Shire where he lead new initiatives in electronic capture of patient data and more recently novel approaches in patient recruitment in and engagement with clinical trials, these included eConsents and trial websites.  Paul has also lead effective changes in clinical outsourcing strategy at Shire and Vectura.

Anthony Fuller is Global Head of Sourcing at Mitsubishi Tanabe, a Japanese pharmaceutical company.  He is based at their New Jersey office.  Prior to joining Mitsubishi, Anthony worked at Eli Lilly and Bristol-Myers Squibb, following some years spent on the supplier side.

In his tenure with Mitsubishi, Anthony has developed what was a largely administrative vendor management department into a strategic function supporting end to end sourcing activities.  He re-organized the US team on a category basis and focused their work on high-touch, high value projects.  More recently, Anthony was asked to create a global Sourcing function for Mitsubishi, aligning people and processes worldwide.

Anthony is recognized as a strong line manager who invests heavily in coaching as well as supporting more formal training to develop his team.  He himself is a graduate of the Universities of Oxford, Sheffield and Northumbria, with postgraduate studies in business, politics and commercial law.  He holds Six Sigma Greenbelt certification, CPSM from the Institute for Supply Management, and MCIPS.  He lives near Princeton with his wife and two children.

Sandra leads cross functional teams to develop cutting edge drugs to contribute to Cancer Research UK’s vision “to bring forward the day when all cancers are cured”. To contribute to this goal Sandra leads science-based decision making and accelerated development of drugs from the early exploratory phase through to phase II clinical trials, with extensive collaboration with commercial and academic partners.

Sandra graduated from the University of Edinburgh and has a PhD in Immunology from Imperial College. She has more than 16 years experience in drug development and prior to her current role spent several years as a project manager within the pharma industry.

Robert Miller is the Chief Medical Officer and Managing Partner of Artemida Pharma Limited a drug development consultancy providing medical input into the strategy and design of development programmes in multiple indications and works with a number of companies providing medical advice.

Dr Miller trained as a cardiac surgeon and joined the pharmaceutical industry as a medical adviser with ICI in 1988. He moved into the international division in 1990 taking responsibility for the global development of products in three therapeutic areas including cardiovascular and intensive care. In 1996, he joined Protodigm Limited, the virtual company set up by Roche, as a founder member and was Director of Clinical Development and was a founder and Chief Medical Officer of Fulcrum Pharma PLC an independent product development consultancy.

Dr Miller is a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, The Royal Society of Medicine, and is a Fellow of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine. He qualified as a physician in 1975 from The London Hospital (England) and has medical degrees from the University of London as well as the Royal Colleges of Surgeons and Physicians of England.

Anthony is an experienced pharmaceutical physician with knowledge spanning a broad range of disciplines and therapy areas. Having founded and built his own successful company, he demonstrated an ability to lead, inspire and motivate, together with keen strategic vision and commercial acumen.

From 2010 – 2014, Anthony worked as a consultant exclusively on orphan drugs and became heavily involved with all facets of the rare diseases community, regularly speaking at conferences. He has built trusted relationships with stakeholders at many different levels, including patient groups, key opinion leaders and academics. Anthony has gained significant experience in drug development for orphan drugs, from understanding the special regulatory requirements applicable for orphan drugs to designing the clinical programs to meet them.

Anthony is very interested in clinical endpoint development, including surrogate endpoints and in innovative drug development pathways, such as adaptive licensing with the involvement of all stakeholders, including payers at an early stage.

He graduated from King’s College London with a first class honours in Physiology and Pharmacology before going on to study medicine at the Royal Free Hospital, London.
[extracted from entry on LinkedIn]

Peter MacLennan has worked on early phase clinical trials throughout a 30-year career spanning academia, biotech and CROs.

With Dr Davy Yeung, he is co-founder of Tailored Clinical Research Solutions (TCRS). Their objective was to build a new kind of CRO that places patients, and the hospital sites that treat them, at the very heart of the clinical trial process.

TCRS’ approach is proving highly effective in early stage clinical studies with Biotech/SME sponsors.

Having worked as a nurse in cardiac transplantation in the UK and Australia, Helen moved into clinical research 26 years ago. She started her clinical trials career as a research nurse in London. Since then, she has managed an SMO and held various positions in both CROs and big pharma within several functional areas including Clinical Operations, Project Management, Business Development and Proposals. Within Illingworth Research Group Helen is responsible for Business Development, Strategic Partnerships, and Executive Oversight and is a keen exponent of trial strategies to improve the patient experience.

Duncan is an enthusiastic and accomplished medicinal chemist with extensive outsourcing experience, a 40-year proven track record with a Blue-Chip Pharmaceutical Company, and is the founder of Awridian Ltd.

Duncan has made significant contributions to numerous drug discovery projects, and is cited on many patents and publications including research areas such as prostaglandin agonists, histamine H2, opioids, angiotensin II and CCR3 receptor antagonists. He has been pivotal numerous lead generation projects gaining a unique insight into project and compound tractability. He has extensive outsourcing experience including projects to enhance screening collections, where he engaged with external partners to design, and synthesise appropriate compounds in a cost effective and timely manner. Duncan has recently published and presented on Open Innovation in Drug Discovery for which he is a strong advocate. He was a founder member of the DiscoverAssist™ Panel at the Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst.

Duncan formed his consultancy company (Awridian Ltd) in 2012, and is currently working with a range of international companies and UK academics.

Steve has had a long and varied career in drug development. Currently he is a Senior Director and Development Team lead for Kyowa Kirin working primarily in the area of immuno oncology drug development. Previously he held the position of Director of Clinical Science at Takeda in the Centre for External Innovation where he was responsible for pulling together development plans for products covering a diverse range of orphan indications with a view to externalising the asset. Prior to joining Takeda, Steve spent a number of years working on challenging drug development projects in Zurich Switzerland and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Whilst in Zurich, Steve was the Director for Global Project Management for the biosimilars development group at Mylan responsible for project and program management of a portfolio of eight biosimilar products.   In Amsterdam,  Steve was head of clinical operations at Amsterdam Molecular Therapeutics (now UniQure) designing and managing the execution of the pivotal study that led to the approval of Glybera, the Western Worlds first gene therapy product.

With over 30 years of clinical development experience within the pharmaceutical industry, Keith started his clinical research career working in the Clinical Pharmacology Unit of G D Searle in 1983, before moving on to manage European Phase II and III studies with G D Searle in gastroenterology.  In the late 1980’s Keith moved to Schering Plough as a Medical Research Associate in oncology and respiratory diseases. 

Following a brief period at Amersham International, he joined Amgen in 1990 with responsibility for European Clinical Development in haematology/oncology from Phase I through to licensing.  Keith joined Roche in 2003 as Operations Project Leader where he planned, staffed and directed global clinical operations in haematology/oncology and rheumatoid arthritis, and then joined CeNeS, a small virtual pharma company, in 2005 to work in the CNS area.  PAION UK Ltd took over CeNeS in 2008, where he remained as Director of Clinical Operations, based in Cambridge, UK.  Keith left PAION in 2016 and currently works as a Freelance Consultant.

Brian has had a highly successful career in drug discovery in industry with GSK and Novartis.  Brian has a BSc in Pharmacy and PhD from the University of Manchester where he worked on novel antifungal agents. This was followed by Post Doctoral study at the University looking at novel opioid-like analgesics, then a two-year industrial Post Doctoral position at Schering Plough in New Jersey focussed on the total synthesis of the marine natural products Pseudopterosins.

Brian then spent 12 years at Glaxo/GlaxoWellcome/GSK working in many different disease areas (CNS, respiratory, cardiovascular, GI and antibacterials). Moving to Novartis (Horsham) in 2002 he became Head of Chemistry with the site specialising in respiratory and GI research, as well as acting as an expertise hub for automated synthesis for the Novartis chemistry organisation (Global Discovery Chemistry). He developed a keen interest in the modulation of ion channels as a target class and the design of inhaled medicines, which he is now a recognised expert in.

Brian moved to the University of Sussex (November 2014), where he is now Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry growing a medicinal chemistry platform underpinned by extensive automated synthesis capability. His group’s focus is the application of high throughput automated synthesis in hit and lead optimisation and the synthesis of novel archive diversity enhancement libraries.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain and registered pharmacist, Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, chartered Chemist and chartered scientist. He is an elected member of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Chemistry Biology interface division Board and the organic and Medicinal Chemistry Sector committee. He is associated with a number of marketed compounds and multiple late stage clinical candidates and is a champion of diversity and inclusion (D&I).

Paul Madeley, Ph.D., is an organic chemist with over thirty years’ experience of chemical synthesis. He has worked for three large companies (Boots, Courtaulds and Abbott Laboratories) and two biotech companies (British Biotech and OSI Pharmaceuticals) before setting up his consultancy company, Synth-Isis Ltd. Dr. Madeley has worked on over one hundred projects, comprising more than six hundred individual reaction steps; at scales ranging from a few grams to several metric tonnes.

In 1995, having worked as a pilot plant manager for five years with Abbott Laboratories, Dr. Madeley moved to virtual pharma and has been responsible for outsourcing more than two hundred manufacturing contracts. This involved development of template agreements and site visits for technical appraisal of potential manufacturers. He has visited more than fifty manufacturing sites in Europe and the US. He has acted as the CMC technical lead for a number of due diligence meetings on behalf of clients on more than twenty occasions; in which he presented the technical package for the API to potential investors. He has also undertaken due diligence examinations of potential in-licensing opportunities. Since setting up Synth-Isis Ltd in 2004, Dr. Madeley has worked with over twenty small biotech and emerging pharma companies, together with a number of service companies, and has prepared the chemistry sections of seventeen IMPDs and three INDs. This has included technical oversight of manufacture of the APIs.

Brian Dickie graduated in 1991 with a Ph.D in Neuropharmacology from the University of Wales College of Medicine. He then took up a research fellowship in the Department of Pharmacology, University of Oxford, where his research on the mechanisms of cell death in Parkinson’s disease was combined with medical teaching at Lincoln College, Oxford.

He has worked for the UK Motor Neurone Disease Association as Director of Research Development for 20 years. His role includes providing strategic guidance to the Association’s research activities, raising the Association’s profile within the biomedical and clinical research communities, increasing the quantity and quality of Association-sponsored and collaborative research, organising the annual International Symposium on Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis/Motor Neuron Disease and communicating advances in MND research to lay and specialist audiences.

Dr Rick Thompson joined Findacure in 2015, after completing his PhD in Evolutionary Biology at the University of Cambridge. He has recently moved to the position of CEO, after working as Head of Research. He is responsible for the running and development of the charity, as well as their scientific projects. These aim to develop a socially financed drug repurposing programme – Findacure’s rare disease drug repurposing social impact bond (RDDR SIB). Rick has designed and completed a proof of concept study to demonstrate the feasibility of the RDDR SIB to the NHS, investors, industry, and patient groups. Rick works to encourage industry engagement with rare disease patient groups, promoting an open and collaborative approach to rare disease research.

Dr Madhu Madhusudhan has over 15 years’ experience in research and business development earned in companies which include multinationals, start-ups and IP consulting firms in the UK, New Zealand and India.  His current role as the Senior Business Manager (Charity Sector) at LifeArc is to focus entirely on facilitating translation and impact of charity-funded research, thus enabling medical research charities to maximise benefits to patients. LifeArc (the new name for MRC Technology)  is a medical research charity with a 25 year legacy of helping scientists and organisations turn their research into treatments and diagnostics for patients.

Email:  [email protected]
Web: www.lifearc.org/

After obtaining his PhD in physiology at the University Medical Center Nijmegen, Roger has worked over 15 years in various positions in the CRO industry. During the last six years, as CEO of PSR, he succesfully lead PSR’s specialisation & expansion into the orphan drug niche. Besides his role at PSR, he is also actively involved as member of the advice group orphan drugs and rare diseases of HollandBio (Dutch Biotech Association) and member of the board of the Association of Contract Research Organisations in the Netherlands (ACRON).