Sir William Castell LVO, Chairman, Wellcome Trust
Previously President and Chief Executive Officer of GE Healthcare and Vice-Chairman of the General Electric Company (GE), he remains a non-exec director of GE. Before that Sir William was Chief Executive of Amersham plc for 15 years.
Earlier in his career, he held various positions with the Wellcome pharmaceutical company, then owned by the Wellcome Trust. He became a non-executive director of BP plc (formerly British Petroleum) in July 2006. (LVO: Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order)
Professor Rod Coombs, Vice-President Innovation & Economic Development, The University of Manchester
Since 2004 one of the Vice-Presidents of The University of Manchester where he has special responsibility for several fields of work including commercialisation of the University’s intellectual property, development of strategic relationships with large companies, and relationships with local and regional stakeholders in the Manchester city region and the North West of England.
Rod Coombs has a BSc in Physics, and MSc and PhD degrees in the economics of innovation and technical change. Joining UMIST’s School of Management in 1979 he worked for over 25 years on analysing the role of technical change in the economy; the management of R&D and innovation processes in large companies; and the role of government policy in promoting innovation in the economy, becoming its first Professor of Technology Management in 1993. During that period he initiated and ran several large collaborative research programmes, and also worked as a consultant to a number of large research-intensive companies, as well as advising national and European government agencies.
In 2002 he became a Pro-Vice-Chancellor of UMIST, and was heavily involved in the project to merge UMIST with the former Victoria University of Manchester in order to create a new University of Manchester, which legally came into existence in October 2004.
Dr Graham Fagg, Partner, Rosetta Capital Ltd
Graham has more than 25 years experience in the life science industry.
Before joining Rosetta in 2003, Graham held management positions at Ciba (now Novartis, Basel) in drug discovery, business development, corporate venturing, research planning and partnership management; and at Catalyst BioMedica, a subsidiary of the Wellcome Trust (London), where he was founding Managing Director. His investment experience includes periods at Accel Partners (San Francisco), where he was involved in the initial financing of Idun Pharmaceuticals; at Catalyst, which invested in a range of pre-seed and start-up opportunities in the medical sciences, including companies such as Cardiodigital, DanioLabs, Molecular Skincare and Paradigm Therapeutics; and at Rosetta, where he has been active in many of the company’s investment and advisory activities.
Graham is a member of the Boards of Directors of PainCeptor Pharma (Canada) and Aditech (Sweden) and manages portfolio investments in Novagali (France) and Curalogic (Denmark). Graham is also a partner in the Dublin-based Seroba-Kernel Life Sciences Fund, a European venture capital fund that was launched in 2009.
Professor John Hickman
John Hickman is an internationally known scientist who trained in pharmacy and received his PhD in organic chemistry in 1971. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, he held university posts in molecular pharmacology in Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester and Yale. As a Director of the Cancer Research Campaign’s (now CRUK) Experimental Chemotherapy group in Birmingham he was lead pharmacologist for the discovery of the important and highly successful drug Temozolomide, now used to treat brain tumours. In Birmingham, he was a founding director of Aston Molecules, a biotech subsequently purchased by OSIP in New York.
Moving to Manchester as the ICI, then Zeneca, Professor of Molecular Pharmacology in 1990 he established close ties with Astra-Zeneca, managing a joint laboratory performing cancer research. His own laboratory focused on the role of apoptosis in determining drug sensitivity and resistance and particularly the role of the Bcl-2 family of proteins.
The Manchester Biotechnology Incubator was co-initiated by him at the University of Manchester. It is a tribute to John’s success and outreach that its restaurant is named “Hickmans”. Professor Hickman moved to Paris in 2000 to direct cancer drug discovery at Servier.
Dr Sarah Herrick, School of Medicine, University of Manchester
Research Fellow in Respiratory Medicine and Programme Director of MRes in Tissue Engineering for Regenerative Medicine (TERM), Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences, The University of Manchester.
Sarah has worked in the field of tissue repair for over 15 years with a particular interest in scarring/fibrosis associated with skin, abdomen and lungs. In 1994 she completed her PhD examining the healing in chronic leg ulcers under the supervision of Professor Mark Ferguson at the University of Manchester. She then moved to UCL where she worked on repair processes inside the body and the formation of scar tissue or adhesions post-operatively. On the basis of this research, she was awarded a 4 year MRC Career Development Fellowship. In 2001, she joined the UK Centre for Tissue Engineering, a joint collaboration between the University of Manchester and Liverpool aimed at finding ways to help the body heal itself. To complement the excellent tissue engineering/regeneration research profile now established in Manchester, she initiated in 2007 a multidisciplinary postgraduate course in Tissue Engineering for Regenerative Medicine to train the next generation of scientists, engineers and clinicians in this rapidly developing area of innovative healthcare.
Dr Linda Magee, Chief Operating Officer, Academic Health Science Centre, University of Manchester
Linda is the Chief Operating Officer of the Manchester Academic Health Science Centre (MAHSC)[1], one of only five in the UK designated by the UK Government’s Department of Health. She initiated and led the development of the North West region’s biomedical cluster Bionow®, one of the largest in the UK, supporting and promoting the biotechnology, pharmaceutical and healthcare industry sectors alongside the academic, research and clinical communities. During her nine years at the NWDA she managed a £60M portfolio of NWDA sector projects and was the Project Director for £34M National Biomanufacturing Centre® at Speke, Liverpool.
Linda was a member of the UK’s Bioscience Leadership Council for its lifetime and has sat on a number of national committees including the National Technology Adoption Centre (NTAC) Hub Board, Industry Strategy Panel of the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the Steering and Strategy Committee of Bioprocess UK (a DTI funded Knowledge Transfer Network) and the Trustech Board (the NW NHS Innovation Hub).
Prior to joining the NWDA Linda spent a number of years as Business Development Manager for the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Manchester and later became co-founder and General Manager of Manchester Biotech Ltd, raising £15M for the UK’s first dedicated biotechnology incubator company. The Incubator received a prize for ‘Best Return on Investment ‘in the Hague in 2002. Linda has a PhD in Medical Biochemistry from the University of Southampton and was awarded an OBE in the 2009 Queen’s Birthday Honours list for services to the biotechnology industry.
[1] MAHSC Partners are University of Manchester, Salford Primary Care Trust, The Christie NHS Foundation Trust, Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust, Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust, Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, University Hospital of South Manchester NHS Foundation Trust
Peter Sanderson, Chairman, UMIP
A corporate banker by profession, mainly within the then Lloyds Bank Group, with further experience in private banking and investment management as a main Board director for Adam & Company, a private bank within the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, Peter has been involved in the technology transfer and intellectual property commercialisation activities of The University of Manchester since 1998, initially as non executive director and Chairman of UMIST Ventures, and then as Chairman of UMIP from its inception in 2004. He also holds non executive directorships for companies within the commercial/industrial property investment and hotel/leisure sectors.
Dr Mark Rahn, MTI
With a Ph.D. in experimental physics and a strong technical grounding including several years of professional scientific research experience, Mark has extended his expertise with nearly ten years commercial experience within technology companies. He co-founded and operationally managed two VC-backed technology start-ups in optoelectronic materials for communications, data storage and displays. He then investigated methodologies and performance of the early-stage technology venture capital sector on behalf of private VC clients and was also responsible for marketing on the board of a tech start-up in the nuclear sector.
Following this successful experience, he made the switch to investment management by briefly providing unsecured loans to Lancashire businesses. Pursuing his interest in technology companies, he transferred to technology VC investments a year before joining MTI as an investment manager.
Mark’s domain expertise follows his experiences working for technology companies and focuses mainly on materials for optoelectronics, semiconductors and the nuclear industry.
Dr Sharon O’Kane, Chief Scientific Officer, Renovo
Sharon is the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Renovo. Renovo is a specialty biopharmaceutical company based in Manchester and a leader in the discovery and development of drugs to reduce scarring. The company was founded in October 2000 raising £8m, a second round of financing ($23m) followed in 2003, and the company floated on the main market of the London Stock Exchange in 2006 raising a further £67.5m. In 2007, Renovo signed a licensing deal with Shire for their lead drug Juvista, worth up to $825m plus royalties.
As Chief Scientific Officer at Renovo, Sharon was responsible for establishing and building all the R&D capabilities and managing all areas of research and drug development in the company, from early stage discovery through all stages of preclinical development, into drug manufacturing and clinical trials supply. She is currently responsible for scientific oversight / strategic direction of all the company’s programmes, including identifying and evaluating external opportunities to ensure pipeline progression and is the director responsible for IT and QA.
Before co-founding Renovo in October 2000, Sharon had a 13-year career based in academia, with many industrial collaborators, publications, invited speaking engagements, large peer-reviewed grants, and numerous international research awards and was latterly at the University of Manchester as a Senior Research Fellow, where she formed Renovo in the year 2000. She has a PhD and BSc (First Class) Honours degree from the University of Ulster.
Sharon was awarded a Diploma in Company Direction from the Institute of Directors in 2006. Sharon delivers various masterclasses on spin-out company formation, entrepreneurship, and the role of women in business and in science; she spoke at last year’s Labour Party Conference in Manchester in a Smith Institute event on funding of start-up companies.
Sharon sits on Lord Drayson’s Government Office for Life Sciences and was part of the Government’s Bioscience Innovation and Growth Team Steering Group, she was co-chair of the Biomedical sector of the ‘Innovation Manchester’ initiative of Manchester City Council / Manchester Knowledge Capital, is a member of AGMA’s Business Leadership Council and is a member of the North West Science Council Biohealth team. She is also an adviser to a venture capital company.
During 2008, Sharon was voted North West Business Woman Entrepreneur of the Year and Crains Business Woman of the Year in Technology / Manufacturing.
