New appointments reflect solid commercial momentum in 2024
Growth driven by increase in AI-led drug discovery approaches which require consistent high fidelity experimentation data
Oxford, UK, 22 August 2024 Arctoris, a leading contract research organisation (CRO) advancing drug discovery experimentation through its unique automated laboratory and data science platform, Ulysses™, today announced the appointment of highly respected pharmaceutical and engineering industry veteran Ian Schott as Chair of the Board, and the creation of an exceptional leadership team to drive further growth and innovation.
So far in 2024, Arctoris has enjoyed significant growth, driven by the expansion of computationally-led drug discovery among its biotech and pharmaceutical partners. Computational and AI approaches require structured, systematic and reliable data to train models and validate their predictions. Through its Ulysses™ automation platform, Arctoris generates bespoke datasets with unprecedented scale, speed and precision across a broad set of drug discovery disciplines. This high-fidelity, ‘gold-standard’ data has been independently shown to surpass the quality and consistency of publicly available and competitor data.
Arctoris will make several significant announcements in the coming months following substantial commercial partnership and strategic collaboration activity.
Ian Shott appointed Chair of the Board
Ian has held global leadership positions with multinational life science companies (ICI, AstraZeneca, Lonza, ChiRex and Rhodia). He was also previously co-founder, majority owner, chairman and managing director of Arcinova, a CRO. Ian also served as the managing partner of Shott Trinova, where he invested in a portfolio of life science businesses. Ian is currently a Non-Executive Director of Quotient Sciences, Executive Chairman of Ingenza and a senior adviser to Permira.
Ian has held positions as a member of the Governing Board of Innovate UK and President of the Institution of Chemical Engineers. He was made CBE for services to Chemical Engineering in 2009 and has served as a Specialist Adviser to the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology.
Leadership team appointments
- Tom Fleming, a co-founder of Arctoris and formerly COO, becomes CEO.
- Dr. Anthony Rowen-Brown joins as Chief Scientific Officer. Thirty years of drug discovery experience spanning both small molecules and biologics. Led 11 successful INDs and brings deep oncology, fibrosis, and inflammation expertise.
- Dr. Kinga Bercsenyi joins as Chief Business Officer. She previously held scientific positions at Cerba Research, Cancer Research, and Wellcome Trust and Business Development Director at Champions Oncology, where she consulted on 10 IND-enabling projects. She brings substantial expertise in immuno-oncology.
- Dr. Alice Roworth moved from VP Operations to Chief Operating Officer. She previously served as Head of Laboratories and a Senior Scientist at Arctoris.
- Paul Custance joins as Chief Financial Officer, a chartered accountant with over 15 years of senior finance leadership experience. Previous positions included positions at PwC and Sony Music and consulting roles supporting startups and scaleups with fundraising and financial strategy.
- Sally Cullen, joins as Chief People Officer. A strategic HR leader with multinational experience across multiple finance and high-growth tech startups.
Tom Fleming, CEO of Arctoris, commented:
“We have built a unique automated platform to solve some of the efficiency and reproducibility challenges inherent with traditional lab-based drug discovery research. It’s an approach guided by the principle that better data today that is precise, consistent and disease-relevant will lead to better drugs tomorrow. Executing this approach requires highly experienced people with deep expertise across science, technology and drug discovery. The quality of the leadership team we have constructed reflects our current progress and future plans for continued innovation to advance the speed, accuracy and success of precision medicinal discovery.”
ENDS
Contact
media@arctoris.com
About Arctoris www.arctoris.com
Arctoris is a technology-enabled drug discovery services company headquartered in Oxford, UK and Boston, USA. Arctoris combines its unique automation platform, Ulysses™, with a world-class team of seasoned drug hunters to guide and rapidly progress biotech and pharmaceutical partner drug discovery programs from target to hit, lead, and candidate. Ulysses™ is capable of supporting diverse experiments in biochemistry, cell biology, protein sciences, structural biology, biophysics, data science and informatics. Arctoris’s meticulous approach of embedding accuracy into every element of the lab process has significantly improved precision, consistency, scalability, and data quality, resulting in thousands of successful experiments with superior results.