about us
The nanoTherics team have considerable experience across the lifescience and pharmaceutical industries, with track records in building successful start-up ventures from academic research.
meet the team
Jon Dobson - Director - holds a personal chair in Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering at the Institute for Science & Technology in Medicine (ISTM), Keele University and an Eminent Scholar Visiting Professorship at the Department of Materials Science & Engineering, University of Florida. He has a B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH-Zurich, 1991). In 2004, Professor Dobson became a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Fellow and was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and Fellow of the Institute for Nanotechnology in 2007. He has more than 140 peer-reviewed publications and has been an invited speaker at more than 25 institutes & scientific meetings, including the recent Royal Society of Medicine / US Food & Drug Administration Conference on Gene Therapy: State of the Art. Since 2003, he has authored 15 invited review articles for journals such as Nature Nanotechnology, Journal of Physics D and Gene Therapy.
Professor Dobson was the recipient of a UK Medical Research Council Milstein Award in 2008 and co-recipient of a Wellcome Trust Showcase Award in 2002. He is on the editorial board of seven journals, including IEEE Transactions on NanoBioscience and Recent Patents on DNA and Gene Sequences and is a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College. He has been a reviewer for more than 40 journals and funding bodies including Nature Materials, Nature Nanotechnology, The Royal Society, The EU, the UK EPSRC, BBSRC and MRC, and the US National Science Foundation.
Neil Farrow - Director/COO - received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology and has worked in both industry and academia. He is currently a Post Doctoral Researcher at Keele University where he is applying his broad knowledge and experience in biology, biophysics and chemistry to a project entitled, ‘Use of magnetic nanoparticles and macrophages to target two novel therapies to hypoxic areas of tumours: a combined biological and mathematical study’. On this project Neil has been responsible for developing the electronic hyperthermia instrumentation, nanoparticles for hyperthermia, magnets for targeting and contributions to the cell biology. Neil received a B.Sc. from the Department of Biology at the University of Portsmouth and then worked in the U.S.A developing clinical applications for in vivo magnetic resonance spectroscopy at the Huntington Medical Research Institute. After completing his Ph.D in the Department of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology (1997) he returned to the UK to work for Cobra Therapeutics to research the biophysical and biological problems of human gene therapy. Neil has published a number of journal articles in the area of medical biophysics and in 2007 was nominated for Regional Citizen of the Year for his work on nanoTherics!
Stefan Ogrodzinski - Non-Executive Director - received his BSc (Hons) in Toxicology and Pharmacology from The School of Pharmacy, University of London, in 1987 and his MBA from De Montfort University in 1999. Stefan's career has spanned the pharmaceutical industry, the healthcare sector, the voluntary sector and the educational sector, giving 20 years of sales, marketing, management and directorship experience.
In 2000, Stefan founded Biostatus and since that time has led the company as its CEO.
Stefan is also a Director and Chairman of Medilink East Midlands Limited, a Director of MagneCell Limited, a member of the third mission committee at the Cardiff Institute of Tissue Engineering and Repair (CITER), a member of the advisory panel for the Astra Zeneca Post Doctoral Training Centre at Nottingham University, a former co-director of the UK Human Tissue Bank and Senior Partner at Ogrodzinski Consultants.
Linda Cammish - Consultant - has 25+ years experience in the life science sector, with 20+ years of this being in a commercial environment. Her strong life science background includes a Ph.D. from Cambridge University (with research conducted at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology) and her business education includes an MBA from Henley Business College. She also has considerable practical, hands-on experience in growing businesses in the high technology life science sector involving products and services (including reagents, hardware, software as well as drug discovery services and technology access programmes) for the academic, pharmaceutical and biotechnology markets. She combines this technical and business education with extensive practical experience in senior business development, sales and marketing roles in companies including Millipore, PerSeptive Biosystems, Applied Biosystems and Abcam.
Mark Payton - Director - is the fund principal for the Mercia Technology Seed Fund. Mark has a PhD from King's College (University of London) and an MBA from Warwick Business School. Prior to joining the fund, Mark was a research fellow at the Department of Pharmacology (University of Oxford), played leading roles within Isis Innovation (the technology transfer arm of the University of Oxford, ranked as the premier technology transfer office in the UK) and was VP Corporate Development at Oxxon Therapeutics Inc (before its sale to Oxford BioMedica Plc). Mark benefits from in excess of 15 years experience from the commercialisation of life science opportunities in the biotech, niche pharma, medtech and diagnostics fields.
Peter Cunliffe - Company Secretary - qualified as a Chartered Accountant in 1983, having trained in Birmingham with one of the then ‘Big 4’ accountancy firms, Deloitte Haskins and Sells.
Since qualifying, Peter has worked in various finance and accounting roles for a wide spectrum of businesses, both in terms of size (£3m up to £1.2bn turnover) and industry sector (including retail, engineering, steel stockholding, laboratory analysis and specialty chemicals).
His early positions were in large blue-chip companies, roles which gave him a full understanding of the importance of pertinent, current management information and the need for strict financial disciplines to augment performance and safeguard assets.
For the last 13 years Peter has headed up finance departments in several SMEs, giving him a sympathetic insight into the role of the finance function in an owner-managed business environment, and the need for that function to embody empathy towards the commercial needs of the business.