Speakers
Claire Bloomfield
Dave Powell
Diana Roettger
Glen Gowers
Panel and Q&A
It can feel that the world has changed significantly in the last year, and there are a number of macro challenges at play. However, the UK also has access to assets and resources that make us world-class in a number of techbio fields, and the potential to build further. How can we best seize on these to manage macro challenges and thrive?
Dr. Claire Bloomfield is a highly accomplished senior leader in life sciences, renowned for her deep expertise in real-world data and AI. With a proven track record of attracting over half a billion in investment, she excels at fostering cross-sector collaborations to drive transformative change and build complex health data infrastructure. Currently, she leads strategic initiatives at Isomorphic Labs to accelerate precision medicine drug discovery. Her career also includes significant leadership roles at NHS England, where she directed the Centre for Improving Data Collaboration and oversaw the £185M Data for R&D Programme, and as CEO of the National Consortium of Intelligent Medical Imaging (NCIMI) at the University of Oxford. Claire holds a DPhil in Neuroscience from the University of Oxford and is a frequent global speaker and advisor on health data and AI.
Dave Powell, PhD, is President of Drug Discovery at Relation, an end-to-end biotech developing transformational medicines, with technology at its core. At Relation, Dave leads experimental drug discovery efforts, including functional genomics, tissue profiling, and target validation, and plays a key role in shaping the company’s early pipeline and future modalities.
Dave is a seasoned R&D leader with more than 25 years of experience across GSK, Summit Therapeutics, and LifeArc, where he served as CSO and led a 150+ person team spanning biologics discovery, small molecule chemistry, diagnostics development, and data sciences. His career spans discovery through Phase 3 clinical trials, with particular strength in preclinical asset progression.
A progressive and collaborative leader, Dave is known for his ability to build and scale high-performing teams and for his laser focus on delivering science that makes a difference for patients.
Diana joined LifeArc as Investment Principal at LifeArc Ventures in 2025. She is responsible for new investments and managing existing portfolio companies.
Diana is an experienced Health and Bio venture capitalist, with 8 years of operational experience in a medical software scale-up. She was a Principal at Apex Ventures focused on early-stage investments through their medical fund, specialising in opportunities at the intersection of technology, biology, and healthcare. She held six portfolio board positions providing supervision, guidance and support. Prior to this, Diana was Chief Scientific Alliance Officer for IAG (Image Analysis Group), a software scale-up specialising in AI imaging technology for biopharma.
Diana was a Research Observer at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, MA focused on software for medical diagnosis and surgical planning. She has a Ph.D in software for neuroimaging and a MSc. in medical computer science from the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany.
Trevor has directed local and Worldwide groups in Computational Chemistry, Computational Biology, Structural Biology, Genetics and Genomics for Lilly, Novartis and Janssen/Johnson & Johnson. He has experience of multiple disease areas but principally in Neuroscience and Immunology seeing projects through from invention of the molecule to phase 2.
His first degree was in Chemistry from the University of Exter followed by MSc and PhD at University of East Anglia and a postdoc at SUNY Buffalo. When at Lilly he was simultaneously a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford with Prof Graham Richards. Before AI was AI Trevor helped develop Bayesian analysis methods and Markov models in the early 90’s.
Trevor has served on multiple UK Research Council scientific advisory bodies particularly in the area of genomics. He has been a visiting Industrial Fellow at Bristol University was a co-founder of the Phenotypic Discovery Initiative (http://npsc.ac.uk/consortia) which he established with the Universities of Oxford, Edinburgh and Dundee. In 2019 he was the J&J scientific lead for a consortium which executed the world’s biggest whole genome sequencing project on the 500,000 samples in the UK BioBank. He was the scientific lead for J&J’s involvement in Our Future Health https://ourfuturehealth.org.uk.
He is co-founder and Chief Partnerships Officer of the not-for-profit Open Immune Foundation