arctoris logo

About Us

Arctoris brings together a world-class team and a revolutionary technology platform.

Contact Us

Our mission

Arctoris is a technology-enabled drug discovery services company headquartered in Oxford and Boston. Arctoris combines its unique automation platform, Ulysses, with a world-class team of seasoned drug hunters to guide and rapidly progress our partners’ drug discovery programs from target to hit, lead, and candidate. Our guiding principles: unparalleled data quality, deep scientific insights, and an agile and client-oriented approach to project management and delivery.

 

Read more about team, technology, and your future with us below.

Our team

Our team consists of biotech and pharma veterans, experienced engineers, as well as seasoned life sciences executives. Together, we are your partner in taking a new drug all the way from idea to the clinic.

Thomas A. Fleming
Thomas A. Fleming

Co-founder and CEO

SALLY CULLEN
Sally Cullen

Chief People Officer

ANTHONY ROWEN-BROWN
Anthony Rowen-Brown

SVP Corporate Development

KINGA BERCSENYI
KINGA BERCSENYI

VP of Business Development

POPPY ROWORTH
Poppy Roworth

VP Operations

John Evans
John evans

Head of Biochemistry

Rahul Yadav

Head of Protein Science

Gareth Fearnley
Gareth Fearnley

Head  of Automation & Cell Biology

Our advisors

BETH J. HOFFMAN
Beth J. Hoffman

 Scientific Advisor

Steven Holtzman
Steven Holtzman

Board Advisor

Professor Khusru Asadullah
Professor Khusru Asadullah

Scientific Advisor

JOHN DAVIS

Scientific Advisor

TEODORO LAINO

Scientific Advisor

Stanley Lapidus
Stanley Lapidus

Board Advisor

Meet Ulysses

Drug discovery is a series of decision-making steps, driven by data. We developed Ulysses, a unique platform that leverages robotics and wet lab automation to make better decisions based on data of unprecedented quality, depth and context, at scale. With Ulysses, we enable the right decisions at the right time, reducing cycle times, and accelerating the progression from idea to IND, enabling you to bringing new medicines to patients faster.

Contact us to hear discuss how you can leverage Ulysses for your drug development

Our values

We are always looking for our next Arctorian. At Arctoris, we value absolute integrity and trust among our team and our clients. We champion the data, focus on delivering the best-possible data quality, and always ask “how could this be done better?”. We share an obligation to dissent among a strong, mission-driven, diverse team, and we never let a team member fail.

Arctoris is growing. Come join us.

Open roles

There are no open roles at this time, please check back soon.

Thomas A. Fleming

Thomas A. Fleming

Co-founder and COO

Tom is a Royal Academy of Engineering SME Leader and was formerly a cancer researcher and Fellow of the Royal Commission of 1851 at the University of Oxford. A chemist by background, he worked both at leading CROs and pharmaceutical corporations. Tom has unique insights into drug discovery, including the critical steps from target identification & validation to high-throughput screening & lead optimization.
Linkedin
SALLY CULLEN

Sally Cullen

Chief People Officer

Sally brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to Arctoris. Her passion for people and development ensures we continue to invest in our ambitious talent and culture agenda. Sally has diverse experience in building high performance teams in high growth tech companies. She has been a member of the Chartered Institute for Personnel & Development for over 20 years and is a qualified occupational psychologist.

Linkedin
ANTHONY ROWEN-BROWN

Anthony Rowen-Brown

SVP Corporate Development

Over 30 years of drug discovery experience in Biotech/Pharma covering all aspects from target ID/validation through pre-clinical development and Ph1/2/3 clinical studies including biomarker and diagnostic development. Experience covers small molecules, biologics and cell-based therapies. Has led 11 programmes through IND into the clinic. Primary focus in oncology, immune-oncology and immune-inflammation. Has held senior positions in both scientific (CSO) & business (CBO) capacities. Experience of leading M&As, in-licensing, financing, private investment and industry/academic grants and has founded a number of start-up Biotechs. Currently Expert in Residence for Drug Discovery at The University of Oxford and sits on the Advisory Boards of two European Biotechs. Holds a D.Phil in Biochemistry from The University of Oxford and an MBA from Oxford Brookes.

Linkedin
KINGA BERCSENYI

Kinga Bercsenyi

VP of Business Development

Kinga has a PhD from Cancer Research UK and University College London. She completed her Postdoc as a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellow at King’s College London and published in both Nature and Science Magazine. She worked as a BD consultant across translational oncology and precision medicine at Champions Oncology and Cerba Research before joining Arctoris. She is passionate about science communication and patient participation in research.
Linkedin
POPPY ROWORTH

Poppy Roworth

VP Operations

Poppy completed her DPhil in Oncology at the University of Oxford and her BSc in Biochemistry at the University of Southampton. She worked for AstraZeneca in the Oncology iMED unit, employing robotic systems for drug discovery. Poppy also was a Visiting Researcher at OncoRay-Dresden. She actively promotes women in STEM and has won several awards as a biochemist.
Linkedin
John Evans

John Evans

Principal Scientist

John completed his PhD in the laboratory of renowned enzymologist Judith Klinman at U.C. Berkeley. His career has encompassed postdoctoral studies at UCSF and team leadership at Syngenta supporting early-stage herbicide research projects focusing on both novel and known modes of action. John joined Arctoris following four and a half years at GlaxoSmithKline as an investigator and team leader in the screening, profiling and mechanistic biology department. His extensive practical experience in enzymology and ligand binding pharmacology, and a strong enthusiasm for integrating kinetic methodologies across the biochemical and cellular spectrum, has enabled the delivery of high-quality mechanistic data for projects.
Linkedin

Rahul Yadav

Head of Protein Science

Rahul is a passionate protein scientist with more than 15 years of experience in the protein sciences field. He has produced more than 200 different types of proteins across bacterial, insect and mammalian expression host systems. He completed his industrial PhD from Oxford Brookes University, in collaboration with UCB-Celltech, and Science and Technology Facility Council (STFC). Rahul’s research focused on studying protein-protein interactions within the mTOR signaling pathway in live cells, utilizing FRET-FLIM technology. This was followed by a post-doctoral position at STFC. During his tenure at Evotec, spanning over 11 years, Rahul played a crucial role in establishing the protein sciences platform. His exceptional track record includes the successful delivery of high-quality proteins essential for early-stage drug discovery pipelines. Rahul has spent much of his career involved in project management and execution, building and managing large multidisciplinary teams, developing new collaborations (both in industry and academic) and contributing to various scientific reports.

Linkedin
Gareth Fearnley

Gareth Fearnley

Head of Automation & Cell Biology

Gareth completed his BSc and PhD at the University of Leeds, where he studied kinase-mediated signal transduction in the context of endothelial cell biology. After a short postdoctoral position at the University of Leeds, he carried out postdoctoral studies at the Babraham Institute, Cambridge. Here, he Identified novel high-confidence substrates for the tumour suppressor phosphatase, PTPRK, using CRISPR and proteomic approaches, and established its role in regulating cell-cell adhesion. Since joining Arctoris, Gareth has gain extensive experience in preforming and overseeing automated cell-based assay development for drug discovery projects (ranging from target validation, hit ID and hit profiling (small molecules and biologics)); in addition to leading the expansion of Arctoris’ cell biology platform.
Linkedin
BETH J. HOFFMAN

Beth J. Hoffman

Advisory Board Member

Beth Hoffman PhD is a seasoned pharmaceutical and biotech executive. Beth is the CEO of San Diego-based Origami Therapeutics. During her distinguished career she has also served as Vice-President of Discovery Biology at Vertex Pharmaceuticals and held leadership positions at Amgen, Eli Lilly, and the NIH. Beth brings invaluable experience in drug
discovery and development, both from the R&D and business perspective.

Linkedin
Steven Holtzman

Steven Holtzman

Board Advisor

Steven is an internationally recognized leader in the biopharma space. He was the CEO of Decibel Therapeutics, CEO & Founder of Infinity Pharmaceuticals, Chief Business Officer of Millennium Pharmaceuticals, and also served as EVP of Corporate Development at Biogen. Steven advises the board on business strategy, the commercial and competitive landscape, and asset-based value-generation.

Linkedin
Professor Khusru Asadullah

Professor Khusru Asadullah

Advisory Board Member

Professor Asadullah is an expert in translational medicine and former Vice-President & Head of Target Discovery at Bayer. He spent more than 15 years as pharma executive, authored 160 publications and led the industry-changing Bayer reproducibility study. Professor Asadullah advises the board on translational and precision medicine, data standards, and drug discovery best practices.

Linkedin

John Davis

Advisory Board Member

John Davis is the Chief Scientific Officer of the Centre for Medicines Discovery (Oxford) and Director of Business Development for the Alzheimer’s Research UK – Drug Discovery Alliance. He has over 25 years of drug discovery expertise all the way from target identification to successful clinical proof of concept for a range of drug candidates in neurological disorders. Following postdoctoral training at the Ludwig Institute and the Salk Institute, he joined GlaxoSmithKline where he led a variety of non-clinical pharmacology research departments for pain and neurodegenerative diseases. In 2010, Professor Davis co-founded the spinout company Convergence Pharmaceuticals, which he later left to become Director of Discovery for Selcia, and CSO and cofounder of Cypralis before joining the University of Oxford.

Linkedin

Teodoro Laino

Advisory Board Member

Teodoro Laino leads the chemical computation and automated synthetic chemistry efforts at the Department of Cognitive Computing and Industry Solutions at the IBM Research Zurich Laboratory. He is interested in the application of machine learning to chemistry and materials science problems with the purpose of developing scalable, tech-enabled solutions to significantly improve chemical synthesis (e.g., IBM RXN for chemistry). A chemist by background, Dr Laino has a PhD in computational chemistry, after which he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Zurich developing algorithms for molecular dynamics simulation.

Linkedin
Stanley Lapidus

Stanley Lapidus

Board Advisor

Stan is a highly successful biotech and medtech entrepreneur and life sciences pioneer with over 30 granted patents. He took two companies from foundation to NASDAQ: EXACT Sciences (EXAS) and Cytyc Corporation (CYTC), bought by Hologic for $6.2 billion. Stan holds an academic appointment at MIT and advises the board on business strategy and the regulatory environment.

Linkedin