Richard Butt

Apollo Therapeutics

Dr Richard Butt is Apollo Therapeutics’ chief scientific officer. He joined Apollo in 2016 and served as the organization’s chief executive officer until 2021. Richard spent more than 20 years at Pfizer, holding multiple leadership roles in preclinical and clinical R&D. During his tenure, he led programs to candidate selection, developed IND-enabling and preclinical regulatory packages, and led design, planning, execution and delivery for over 30 clinical studies spanning Phase 0 to Phase 2. Richard has always focused on project and portfolio leadership across the preclinical, translational and clinical phases of R&D. Richard is a cell biologist with a degree in biochemistry from the University of York and a doctorate from University College London

Paul Mercer

Francis Crick Institute, UK

 

As Head of Collaborations at the Francis Crick Institute, Dr Mercer is an established translation lead, leveraging over £30M of funding to enable industry-academic alliances with the aim of enhancing translation of discoveries through to technology and health innovation. Building on a track record as a research scientist, he has led projects from early clinical proof of concept through to experimental medicine.

 

Dr Mercer completed his PhD in Respiratory Cell Biology at the University of Southampton in 2001 and subsequently took up a postdoc as a joint appointment between Novartis Institute of Biomedical Research, Horsham and the Imperial College London Leucocyte Biology group under Prof. John Westwick and Prof. Tim Williams; investigating inflammatory mediators of COPD. In 2004 he moved to the Centre for Respiratory Research at University College London investigating the interaction between coagulation and lung injury leading to chronic disease with Prof. Rachel Chambers. Most notably during his time at UCL he was seconded to GSK Respiratory as an academic/ industry appointment to act as biology lead for the PI3 kinase programme within the Fibrosis DPU, developing early discovery strategies for the development of novel therapeutics in pulmonary fibrosis. Prior to joining the Crick as Head of Collaborations in 2018, he managed the EMINENT (Experimental Medicine Initiative to Explore New Therapies) consortium; a £16M experimental medicine consortium, supported by the MRC and GSK to enable researchers from five leading UK HEIs and utilising GSK assets and expertise in experimental clinical studies to address areas of unmet need in difficult to treat inflammatory settings.

Davide Danovi

KCL, UK

Davide has several years of experience developing phenotyping platforms to characterise stem cell behaviour in both university and biotechnology companies. He holds an MD from University of Milan and a PhD in Molecular Oncology from the European Institute of Oncology. He is part of the FLIER (Future Leaders for Innovation Enterprise and Research) group of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Angelica Figueroa

INIBIC, Universidad de la Coruna, Spain

Angélica Figueroa obtained her bachelor's degree in biology from Complutense University of Madrid.  Then, she obtained her PhD studies in 2002 in Molecular Oncology at the Biomedical Research Institute in Madrid (Spain). During her PhD, she had the opportunity to complete her research work thanks to short-term stays at prestigious international institutions including Institute for Molecular Bioscience from Queensland University, (Australia, 2001) and the National Institute on Aging-National Institute of Health (USA, 2002). In 2003, she moved to London as a postdoctoral fellow at the LMCB - Medical Research Council-University College London (2003-2008) where she became interested in studying the implication of the epithelial plasticity in tumor progression. In 2009, established her own lab at A Coruña Biomedical Research Institute (INIBIC, A Coruña) where she leads a multidisciplinary team including clinical and basic researchers specialized in different areas of knowledge. Her team is committed to cancer research and innovation.

Pamela Lochhead

Astrazeneca

Pamela received a PhD in Biochemistry from the MRC Protein Phosphorylation Unit at the University of Dundee studying the signalling pathways that regulated hepatic gene expression. She then conducted postdoctoral research at the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute, then moved to a Senior Scientist position at the Babraham Institute, investigating the role and regulation of kinases down-stream from the proto-oncogene RAS which are involved in development and cancer. During this time she was involved in a number of Academic/Industry collaborations.

Excited by proximity inducing drugs such as PROTACs and molecular glues to induce target degradation or other beneficial protein: protein interactions, she moved to the department of Mechanistic & Structural Biology, Discovery Sciences at AstraZeneca in 2020. Here she has worked on a number of Oncology drug discovery programmes.

Stuart Farrow

Cancer Research Horizons, CRUK

Before joining Cancer Research UK Therapeutic Discovery laboratories as director of biology in 2015, Stuart spent more than 20 years in drug discovery and leadership roles in the pharmaceutical industry. Most recently he was based at the University of Manchester, where he directed the establishment of the Manchester Centre for Collaborative Research in Inflammation (MCCIR), a £15M initiative funded by GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca and the University of Manchester. He is a past member of the MRC Infection and Immunity Board. Stuart has worked in several therapeutic areas and has directed major translational research initiatives in apoptosis, immunology and circadian biology. He has led discovery teams that have generated several clinical candidate molecules and has overseen biology programmes for drugs that have achieved regulatory approval and launch. In his current role he has been closely involved in the establishment of major drug discovery alliances in cancer immunology between CR-UK and various industry partners.