Chris Hillier is Professor of Physiology at Glasgow Caledonia University,
Scotland and a serial entrepreneur. In 2002, he co-founded Biopta Ltd,
a unique contract research organization that specializes in drug screening
tests and instruments based on his own patented non-imaging optical technology.
As CEO, he saw Biopta through two funding rounds until 2006 when he accepted
a Visiting Professorship with Integrated DNA Technologies, the largest
suppliers of nucleic acids in the United States and a leader in innovative
biotechnologies, before returning to Scotland to found Sistemic Ltd, a
company focused on developing products for the growing miRNA and RNAi markets.
Combining
considerable business and management experience with a strong R&D background,
he has published and presented extensively and acted as a consultant and
business mentor for young Scottish entrepreneurs giving seminars on start-up
strategies, IP protection and motivational talks to academic entrepreneurs.
In the words of the UK national newspaper, the
Guardian, he has “received just about every award or grant (for innovation
and enterprise that) Scotland has to offer” including a Proof of
Concept Award, a Royal Society of Edinburgh Enterprise Fellowship, a John
Logie Baird Award for Innovation, Scottish Executive SMART and SPUR Awards
and was a beneficiary of the innovative Scottish Co-Investment Fund that
directed public funding into private equity for the first time in the UK.
Dr Leon Hooftman is currently Chief Medical Officer of Chroma Therapeutics,
an emerging drug discovery and development company based in Abingdon, Oxford.
The company is focused on the identification of novel anti-cancer agents
based on chromatin biology.
Before joining Chroma he was Head of Clinical
Development at Celltech Group plc, a FTSE 250 biopharmaceutical company.
Prior to this he was Director of Clinical Science for Oncology/ Immunology
at F.Hoffmann La Roche, where he built up extensive experience of biotechnology
development programmes, including Rituxan (lymphoma), and CellCept (transplantation).
Dr
Hooftman qualified in medicine in 1984, from the University of Utrecht,
the Netherlands. He trained in surgery and transplant medicine in Holland,
the UK and USA and holds a MD and BSc in medical sciences of Utrecht University.
He joined the industry in 1991.
Prof Peter
O’Shaughnessy
Glasgow School of Veterinary Medicine
Prof O’Shaughnessy graduated with a BSc in Pharmacology from the
University of Glasgow in 1976 and a PhD from the University of Bristol
in 1979. After a post-doctoral period at the University of Michigan
he became a Lecturer in Anatomy at the University of London before moving
to the University of Glasgow in 1993 to take up a Lectureship in Physiology
and Pharmacology at the Veterinary School. He was awarded a Personal Chair
in 1998 and until recently was the Head of Department of Preclinical Sciences
at the Veterinary School.
Peter maintains a highly active research group
and in the past five years has been awarded grants worth over £2
million from the BBSRC and Wellcome Trust. His particular areas of research
expertise are in Reproductive and Developmental Biology with an emphasis
on the mechanisms of gonadal development. He sits on the Editorial Board
of 3 journals.
During the past ten years Peter has been Head of a commercial
GLP-status laboratory at the University of Glasgow and has prepared expert
reports in both human and veterinary medicine. He has assisted pharmaceutical
and biotechnology companies with strategic and technical preclinical advice
for regulatory submissions.
David Thurston is a pharmacist (BSc, M.R.Pharm.S.) and medicinal chemist
(PhD), and has lectured and carried out research at the Universities of
Kentucky and Texas at Austin (USA) and Portsmouth, Nottingham and London
(UK) where he is presently Professor of Anticancer Drug Discovery, Head
of the Department of Pharmaceutical & Biological Chemistry and Director
of the Cancer Research UK Gene Targeted Drug Design Research Group in the
School of Pharmacy.
His research interests involve the design, synthesis
and development of novel anticancer drugs, and one agent from his laboratory
(SJG-136) is currently being evaluated in clinical trials. More recently
(2007), he has been awarded a five-year CR-UK Small Molecule Drug Discovery
Initiative Programme Grant, one of only four awarded in the UK, to discover
novel anticancer agents working through the inhibition of protein-protein
interactions.
He has supervised over 50 postdoctoral research fellows and
PhD students, is author of over 100 research publications in medicinal
chemistry/chemistry journals and books, and is frequently invited to speak
at national and international conferences and in universities and research
institutes world-wide.
He has been a member of a number of national committees
in the UK including the Committee on Safety of Medicines (CSM), the grants
committees of Cancer Research UK (CR-UK) and the Association for International
Cancer Research, the New Agents Committee of CR-UK (which evaluates new
drugs proposed for Phase I clinical trials), and the UK Government’s
University Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) panel for pharmacy (1992
and 1996).
Professor Thurston is also one of the scientific founders of
the biotechnology company Spirogen Ltd, and has consulting experience with
a number of other pharmaceutical companies. Spirogen was recently awarded
the accolade of Entrepreneur of the Year by the London Biotechnology Association.
