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Advisory group
With thanks to our Advisory Group for their assistance in building the agenda for TechBio UK. Meet them in person on 16 October!
David Atkins
Dr Atkins has over 25 years’ experience as a global leader in a broad range of life science and healthcare businesses. He has held senior leadership positions in R&D, business development, operations and sales and marketing. David has extensive commercial experience in markets in North America, EMEA, Asia and Latin America. With his most recent responsibilities in venture investing, David has experience in all facets of building and growing new businesses. David was CEO of Congenica 2018 - 2022 and successfully led the business through a major business transformation, several rounds of fund raising and established Congenica as one of few UK “scale up” TechBio businesses operating at the interface of tech and genomics. Prior to joining Congenica, Dr Atkins has over 20 years’ experience with Johnson & Johnson based in Australia, US, Canada, and UK in a broad range of roles including R&D, business development and in global commercial roles. In addition, he was CEO of Synevo, a clinical diagnostic laboratory service business operating across Germany and Eastern Europe and global head of the Advanced Staining pathology business unit for Leica Biosystems, a Danaher Company. David previously was an active scientist with over 30 peer-reviewed publications. David has been an active contributor to the development of biotech and device industries in several geographies and has had leadership roles in professional associations throughout his career including most recently BIA, BIVDA and EDMA. He represents BIA on the UK National Genomics Board, is a member of the Wellcome Sanger Institute COSMIC governance board and supports Gene People as a Trustee.
Aline Charpentier
Aline is the Head of Innovation for Bruntwood SciTech Melbourn Science Park, working on establishing it as a thriving ecosystem for TechBio companies. Aline’s experience covers a wide range of support to entrepreneurs in life sciences, having developed Bioentrepreneurs bootcamps across Europe, established the One Nucleus Virtual Innovation Centre for growing companies and now advising an early stage therapeutics fund, BioTranscript. Prior to joining the Cambridge ecosystem, she worked on technology transfer programmes for the scientific services of the French Embassy in the USA (Boston) and technology scouting at the CEA (Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique). She holds a MSc in Molecular Biology from the University of Toulouse and MBA from Grenoble School of Management.
Uzma Choudry
Uzma is a scientist turned VC with experience of investing across frontier tech and bio. While completing her biophysics PhD and working with university spinouts, Uzma developed a deep interest in the commercialisation of moonshot science and its impact on society both today and in the next 10-50 years. The exposure to exciting innovations and early-stage spinouts helped her grasp the many challenges of taking science from the lab and building a business around it. This formed part of her passion for helping to realise the full potential of cutting-edge innovation. She feels privileged to have the opportunity to work with and back some exceptional entrepreneurs and academics in their quest to change the world through their innovations – turning sci-fi into reality!
Barbara Domayne-Hayman
Barbara has worked on the commercial side of life sciences for thirty years, first in a large organisation (ICI/Zeneca/AstraZeneca), before transitioning to the entrepreneurial world of biotech. Barbara joined the Francis Crick Institute in January 2018 as Entrepreneur-in-residence, where amongst other things, she co-founded, led and now is Chair of the KQ Labs accelerator, which is focused on start-ups from all over the UK who are making use of data/AI applied to health. She is also Chief Business Officer of Autifony, where she is responsible for strategic partnering, fundraising and commercial aspects of drug development for CNS disorders. Barbara was also Chair of Puridify, a UCL spin-out with a breakthrough biotherapeutics purification technology, which was acquired by GE (now Cytiva) in November 2017. She is a member of the investment committees of the LifeArc Ventures Fund, and the Cambridge Enterprise Seed Fund. Previously, Barbara was CEO of Stabilitech, and she was Commercial Director at Arrow Therapeutics until the company was acquired by AstraZeneca. Barbara was also Senior Business Development Manager at Celltech. Barbara has a BA and D Phil in Chemistry from the University of Oxford, and is a Sloan Fellow from London Business School.
Anthony Finbow
Anthony Finbow is Chief Evangelist at Eagle Genomics, a pioneer in the application of network science to biology across key industries such as Food & Nutrition, Beauty & Personal Care, AgBio and BioPharma. He has worked for over two decades as a leader, building and scaling deep technology businesses, and has a particular enthusiasm for businesses operating at the intersection of life science and data science. Anthony is currently Vice Chairman of the BIA's Genomics Advisory Committee. He is also on the Executive Committee of the UK Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) Microbiome Innovation Network, set up to develop a proactive, self-sustaining microbiome community in the UK and to raise the visibility of the UK’s world leading microbiome science. As Executive Chairman and CEO, Anthony has built and exited a number of intellectual property rich B2B software companies. In particular, he was responsible for the turnaround, strategic repositioning and sale of private venture backed communications software company, Psytechnics to US Nasdaq-listed NetScout. Similarly, as Managing Director of MetaSolv, he was responsible for doubling the size of the European business, prior to that company being acquired by Oracle. In his early career, Anthony worked as an aircraft engineer and in industrial lasers and electro-optics. He trained as a lawyer and worked as a banker in the privatization of former East German industrial companies, before moving into leadership roles with technology businesses.
Steve Gardner
Steve is a serial technology entrepreneur with over 30 years’ experience developing and commercializing ground-breaking data science and informatics in the healthcare, life sciences and agri-food sectors. Never afraid to innovate, Steve has an established track record in building world-class companies, teams and products working at senior levels in the UK, EU and US for Fortune 500 and start-up companies. He is a former Global Director of Research Informatics for Astra A/B and has consulted with drug discovery and safety teams in over 20 biopharma companies.
Sara Holland
After a PhD in fission yeast chromosome engineering, Sara spent 8 years as a postdoctoral researcher at Nottingham University in yeast molecular biology before joining Potter Clarkson 9 years ago. Now a UK and European patent attorney, Sara has a strong interest in helping to commercialise research originating from universities, particularly in the synthetic biology/engineering biology space. Educating people, particularly academics and scientist founders about IP and its critical role in bringing technology to the market is a key motivator and Sara has lectured on a number of Masters courses and EPSRC summer schools. Sara also co-founded a Women in Synthetic Biology network, alongside Liz Fletcher of the IBioIC and Fiona Mischel from Synbiobeta.
Jack O'Meara
Jack O'Meara is co-founder and CEO of Ochre Bio, a biotechnology company developing novel RNAi medicines for liver diseases. Ochre has raised $44M from top tier global investors, assembled a team of seasoned biotechnology professionals, and built a drug discovery platform combining advanced genomics, machine learning, and human-centric translational models. Jack is a biomedical engineer by training, with a background in bringing new medicines and health technologies to market. He was on the team at Avexis that brought the first blockbuster gene therapy, Zolgensma, through FDA, EMA and PDMA approval. Jack received his Bachelor's degree from National University of Galway and his Masters from the University Notre Dame. His work has been featured in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and he was listed on the Forbes 30 under 30 list. He's passionate about the intersection of healthcare, technology, science, and strategy.
James Wong
James is Venture Partner at MedTech SuperConnector. He brings venture capital investment, corporate, and board experience from supporting venture-backed companies in the UK, Europe, and the US. James was previously Investment Principal at Oxford Science Enterprises, where he focused on life sciences investing (Genomics plc, Evox Therapeutics), served on the boards of university spinout portfolio companies (Oxford Nanoimaging, SpyBiotech), and mentored entrepreneurial students (CyanoCapture). Before this, he was Head of Corporate Advisory at Mercia Asset Management and Investment Director at Fosun Pharma. This built on his experience as Investment Manager at NBGI Ventures, where he focused on medical technology investing and served in board roles of portfolio companies in the UK, Europe, and the US. James started his career at Cambridge Consultants and holds an MPhil in Computational Biology from the University of Cambridge, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.