Seeding Drug Discovery Committee
The Seeding Drug Discovery (SDD) Committee makes funding decisions on all Seeding Drug Discovery Awards.
Members
Dr Allan Baxter
Chairman of the Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst Board
SDD Committee role: Chairman
Dr Ted Bianco
Director, Technology Transfer, Wellcome Trust
SDD Committee role: Staff member
Dr Fran Brown
Independent Consultant
SDD Committee role: Independent member
Professor Peter Leadlay FRS
Herchel Smith Professor of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge
SDD Committee role: Independent member
Dr Dan Marquess, D.Phil
Vice-President, Medicinal Chemistry, Theravance
Dr Fiona Marshall
Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Heptares Therapeutics
SDD Committee role: Vice Chairman
Dr John Rex
Vice President and Medical Director for Infection, AstraZeneca
SDD Committee role: Independent member
Dr Richard Seabrook
Head of Business Development, Technology Transfer, Wellcome Trust
SDD Committee role: Secretary
Biographies of the independent members
Allan Baxter is Chairman of Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst. During his 30 year career in pharma, he served as global head of the Centres of Excellence for Drug Discovery and latterly as global head of Medicines Development at GlaxoSmithKline. He is Chief Strategy Officer for Ascletis Pharmaceuticals (Hangzhou) Ltd and is a non-executive director of Vernalis plc, Human Genome Sciences Inc and Autifony Therapeutics Ltd and represents GSK on the board of Convergence Pharmaceuticals. He holds a PhD in Biochemistry and honorary DSc from Glasgow University and an honorary DSc from the University of Strathclyde, where he graduated in Chemistry.
Dr Fran Brown has over 18 years experience within pharmaceutical development, with a focus on the needs associated with early projects. She was previously Director of Clinical Operations at Biovitrum, where she put in place the clinical, regulatory and pharmacovigilance infrastructure essential to support the commitments which come with the management of globally available products. Prior to this, Fran spent several years at Roche where she was an integral part in the successful registration of two new products in global markets, worked as a clinical pharmacology liaison between research, development and business and led the strategic development of multiple compounds through to clinical trials. Fran now works as an independent consultant to support small companies on the development pathway.
Professor Peter Leadlay FRS is Herchel Smith Professor of Biochemistry at Cambridge. He is a co-founder and non-executive Director of Biotica, a Cambridge start-up using biosynthetic engineering to expand the therapeutic potential of polyketide natural products. Professor Leadlay holds a B.A. in chemistry (1971) and a D.Phil. in enzyme chemistry (1974) from the University of Oxford. After post-doctoral studies at ETH Zürich and Oxford he moved to Cambridge in 1979 becoming Professor of Molecular Enzymology in the Department of Biochemistry in 1999. He has published 190 scientific articles mainly on the genetics and biochemistry of natural product biosynthesis. He has received the Royal Society of Chemistry Celltech Medal (2002), a Chaire Internationale de Recherche Blaise Pascal held at Institut Pasteur Paris (2003-2004), the Remsen Award of the American Chemical Society (2006), the Smets Prize Chair at Louvain/Leuven (2010) and a Humboldt Prize (2011) from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He is Honorary Professor at the University of Wuhan (2011).
Dr Dan Marquess, D.Phil joined Theravance in 1998 and held various positions in the Medicinal Chemistry Department before being promoted to Vice President, Medicinal Chemistry in June 2007. Prior to joining Theravance, Dr Marquess worked in the Medicinal Chemistry Department at GlaxoSmithKline, Stevenage UK from 1994-1998. Dr. Marquess was a NATO post-doctoral Fellow at Stanford University. He earned his D.Phil. in Organic Chemistry at the University of Oxford. He holds a B.Sc. in Chemistry from Queen's University of Belfast.
Fiona Marshall is a co-founder and Chief Scientific officer of Heptares Therapeutics Ltd a GPCR drug discovery company utilizing a novel structure based drug discovery approach. She has a BSc in Biochemistry from Bath University and a PhD in Neuroscience from Cambridge. She has 20 years’ experience in drug discovery with particular expertise on G-protein-coupled receptors. She spent 12 years at GlaxoSmithKline where she held a number of senior positions including Head of the Department of Molecular Pharmacology.She was Director of Discovery Pharmacology, Europe for Millennium Pharmaceuticals and then spent several years as an independent consultant to a variety of venture capital and biotech companies, including Inpharmatica, Merlion, Galapagos, Paradigm, Cancer Research Technology, Shire, CellAura, Bioimage, Chroma, Ablynx and Sentinel. She was chair of the BBSRC biochemistry committee and is currently Chair of the CRUK Drug Discovery Committee.
John H. Rex received his MD from Baylor College of Medicine (Houston, Texas) in 1982, trained in Internal Medicine at Stanford University Hospital (Stanford, California), and then was a Fellow in Infectious Disease at the National Institutes of Health. John is Board-Certified in both Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases. From 1992 to 2002, John was on the faculty of the University of Texas Medical School-Houston (Houston, Texas), was the Hospital Epidemiologist for five years at a 600-bed tertiary referral centre, and became Professor of Medicine in 2001. During this time, John’s clinical and laboratory work focused on the development of novel antimicrobial agents in general with a special focus on new antifungal agents. John has participated in the design, implementation, analysis, and regulatory filing of multiple agents and is widely known for his work in this area. He has published more than 150 papers as well as over 30 book chapters. John joined AstraZeneca in January 2003 and he currently serves as Vice President and Medical Director for Infection. In this role, he has responsibility for the overall strategic direction of AstraZeneca’s anti-infective Discovery, Licensing, and Development teams. As well as his internal work, John remains active externally. He is an Editor for Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, is a Section Editor for Anti-Infectives for Current Opinion in Anti-infective Investigational Drugs, is on the Highlights Advisory board of Nature Reviews Microbiology, and serves on the program committees for annual meetings of both the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the European Society for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases.