BIA Networking Lunch - Glasgow

Steve Bates OBE

Chief Executive Officer

What does your role at BIA involve?

Steve Bates is the CEO of the UK Bioindustry Association, the UK’s Trade Association for innovative life science companies with over 550 members. Steve is the visible face of the vibrant UK life sciences industry to government and media. He serves on the UK Government’s Life Sciences Council and the UK Biosecurity Leadership Council. Steve was a founder member of the UK Government’s Vaccine Taskforce in the Covid crisis, sitting on its steering Board alongside Kate Bingham. He is active member and former chair the International Council of Biotech Associations and has been a board member of EuropaBio since 2015.

Previous experience & achievements

Steve has championed, with government, effective industrial incentives like the Biomedical Catalyst, which have crowded in private sector investment into UK SMEs. He is a driving force behind the scale up agenda, spearheading policy agenda to unlock UK pension fund capital into productive UK growth in life sciences. He has forged several links for the sector across the USA, Europe and in China. In his time at the BIA, Steve has developed new member groups focused on cell and gene therapy, genomics and engineered biology. A strong advocate of partnership working, Steve champions sector collaboration with research charities and academia. Proud to lead an organisation with a diverse Board with over 40% female representation, Steve is committed to next generation talent and developing the skills needed for the sector to flourish. Before joining the BIA in 2012, Steve worked for Genzyme and was advisor to the UK Government of Tony Blair working on NHS reform and the Northern Ireland peace process. He was made OBE for services to innovation in 2017 and became a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Science in 2020.

Blair Johnston

CMAC

Dr Blair Johnston is a Senior Lecturer in Computational Modelling at the Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences. He teaches on the Masters of Pharmacy, Pharmaceutical Analysis, Clinical Pharmacy and Chemistry with Drug Discovery degrees. His group has research interests in five broad areas: drug discovery, molecular structure simulation, machine learning and prediction, data analysis, and web-enabled science and collaboration tools. In the vast majority of the research, the group work closely with experimental scientists in the design and execution of collaborative research to realise the full potential of their laboratory data. This combination of experiment and theory often provides unique insight into the systems being studied.

Mazdak Salavati

Research Fellow in Livestock Genomics, The Roslin Institute

After graduating as a veterinarian with a keen interest in livestock data and herd health management, Mazdak obtained his PhD in biomedical sciences in 2013. He started to work as a postdoctoral researcher at The Royal Veterinary College from 2013-2018 in molecular biology and bioinformatics. During this time he worked with a variety of livestock genomics research groups across Europe and the United States as one of the bioinformaticians of the Genotype plus Environment consortium. He is currently working as the core scientist within the ruminants functional genomics lab, at the Roslin Institute, with a focus on projects running as part of the Centre of Tropical Livestock Genetics and Health and the Functional Annotation of Animal Genomes project. He has a vested interest in functional programming in R, Python and bash scripting for developing analytical pipelines. His research interests could be summarised as transcriptomics and allele specific expression profiling, multidimensional data analytics, livestock informatics and big data visualisations, and distributed computing.

Mark Warne

Chief Executive Officer, DeepMatter

Mark Warne was appointed as Chief Executive Officer of DeepMatter Group plc on the 2 July 2018. Mark, who joined DeepMatter as a Non-Executive Director in September 2015 also served as its Executive Chairman between April 2017 and July 2018. Mark is widely recognised in the UK and International life sciences sector, having spent almost 10 years at IP Group Plc, a leading intellectual property commercialisation company, where he led the Healthcare team. He managed a portfolio of £330m of net assets in 2016/2017 and represented IP Group on the boards of both listed and private companies. In 2018, concurrent with the integration of Touchstone Innovations into IP Group, Mark became a Partner in the Life Sciences division. He joined IP Group from pre-clinical drug discovery CRO, Exelgen, where he was Managing Director. Mark spent eight years at Exelgen (formerly Tripos Discovery Research) where he also held positions in licensing and strategic affairs, project management and research. He has a PhD in Computational Chemistry, an MSc in Colloid Science and a BSc in Chemistry, all from the University of Bristol. Mark is a Chartered Chemist and member of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He serves as a non-executive director on the boards of Open Orphan plc and Ixico plc.

Andrea Johnston

Programme Manager, CMAC

Andrea is Programme Manager of CMAC, ESPRC Future Manufacturing Research Hub in Continuous Manufacturing and Advanced Crystallisation. CMAC was cocreated with industry in 2011 and it’s vision is to transform medicines development and manufacture, through delivering predictive design tools and novel integrated modular MicroFactories. Led from University of Strathclyde it has six partner Universities (Bath, Cambridge, Leeds, Loughborough, Sheffield, and Imperial College London) and eight global pharma Tier 1 members (AstraZeneca, Bayer, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche and Takeda) in addition to a number of Tier 2 members, innovation spokes and strategic partners. An ambitious research programme and exemplar technical translation activities led from world-class facilities provide a nurturing environment for training the workforce of the future. Andrea also works across the digital manufacturing community and is on Executive Group for Connected Everything II Network, part of MMIP Skills and a keen advocate for E,D &I in STEM. Prior to joining CMAC in 2011, Andrea was a research fellow in solid-state chemistry with a keen interest in pioneering machine learning for crystallisation outcomes.

Dave Tudor

Managing Director, Pharmaceuticals, HealthTech and Quality, Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre and the RNA Centre of Excellence and Biologics Centre

Dave is the Managing Director of Pharmaceuticals, HealthTech and Quality, which includes the Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre in Glasgow, the RNA Centre of Excellence and Biologics Centre in Darlington. The Medicines Manufacturing Innovation Centre is a collaboration between CPI, University of Strathclyde, UK Research & Industry, Scottish Enterprise and founding industry partners, AstraZeneca and GSK. The centre will ensure the UK is a technology and innovation leader in pharmaceutical manufacturing, thereby boosting the competitiveness of both sectors. The initial focus will be on technology translation for small molecule drug manufacture. Dave also leads the Biologics business unit, CPI’s Quality function, which includes GMP obligations, and CPIs PMO function. Prior to joining CPI in January 2019 Dave worked for GSK. He joined the company in 1992 as a PhD Chemist from Glasgow University. He has over 20 years’ experience at GSK carrying out a number of Technical, Compliance and Manufacturing leadership roles. In 1997 he moved to Irvine to take up a lead chemist role before coming Quality Control Manager in 1998. He joined the site leadership team in 2001 to run Technical Development before moving to manufacturing as Actives Production Director in 2005. During this time he completed a Masters degree in Manufacturing Leadership at Cambridge University. In 2007 he moved to GSK House to work on a central network re-structuring project before becoming Site Director at Montrose in October 2008. At Montrose, he led the transformation of the site to manufacture over 12 products for GSK including a major investment programme. In 2011 he was appointed VP Primary Supply Chain with responsibility for global Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) manufacture and supply, a network of GMS sites across the world including facilities in Asia and Europe.