InhibOx Appoints New CEO, Strengthens Management Team and Raises Funding
Oxford, UK, 19th May 2010. InhibOx Ltd (Oxford, UK) announces new funding and Board appointments to accelerate commercial growth and technical development.
InhibOx, a leader in computer-aided drug discovery, uses breakthrough proprietary technology and cloud computing to offer no-compromise, on-demand lead identification and optimization services which have demonstrated dramatically improved results over traditional HTS and virtual screening methods. The company has raised funding, from institutional and private investors and the management team, to enable InhibOx to develop further its proprietary drug discovery systems and to drive the first stages of commercial growth for the company.
Direct sales and service operations are being developed in Europe and in the USA from the company’s bases in Oxford, UK and Princeton, NJ respectively. The company’s commercial growth will be driven further through the development of strategic partnerships with international organizations delivering complementary services or technology.
Technical progress will focus on developing new methodologies to supplement the company’s proprietary array of lead identification and optimization methods, all integrated on its 100 million compound Scopius database. The company will maintain its strategy of applying the greatest possible rigor to studies to deliver no-compromise computational drug discovery.
With commercial and technical development in mind, the company has made three important changes to strengthen its Board structure:
Paul Davie has joined the company and has been appointed to the Board as its new Chief Executive Officer. Davie has a long and successful track record in commercial roles in computer-aided drug discovery. He held support and sales roles at Chemical Design before going on to build and manage the European sales, marketing, support and consulting operations at Oxford Molecular. He went on Accelrys to establish their Consulting Division and serve as European General Manager, before becoming Chief Operating Officer at InforSense. He then founded and was CEO at Secerno, a successful database security company, before returning to research informatics with his consulting company, Davinger. He has an MBA and graduated in chemistry from Wadham College, Oxford.
Paul Finn has been appointed to a new role as InhibOx’s Chief Scientific Officer, to drive the company’s product and service strategy. Dr Finn worked as a scientist in the computational chemistry group at SmithKline Beecham, where he focused on the discovery of novel antibiotic agents. He then moved to Pfizer's computational chemistry group where he was responsible for developing Pfizer's in-house approach to virtual screening. He was appointed group director of R&D at TopoTarget, a listed drug development company focused on oncology, and was responsible for their extremely successful HDAC inhibitor program (now in Phase III trials). He has a degree in biochemistry from St Peter's College, Oxford and Ph.D. from the University of Manchester.
Professor Graham Richards, C.B.E., M.A., D.Phil, D.Sc, C.Chem, FRSC, founder of InhibOx, has been appointed as its Chairman. Professor Richards is one of the world’s leading computational chemists. He served as Chairman of the Department of Chemistry at Oxford University from 1997 to 2007. Recognition includes the Mullard Award of The Royal Society, the Italgas Prize and the 2004 Award of the American Chemical Society for Computers in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research. Throughout his career, Professor Richards has been involved in the commercialization of technologies. In 1989, he co-founded Oxford Molecular Ltd, which later floated on the London Stock Exchange as Oxford Molecular Group plc. He was a director of ISIS Innovation Ltd, the University of Oxford's technology transfer company and was involved for several years with the Wellcome Trust in a similar capacity. He is a main board director (formerly Chairman) of IP Group plc. He is a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford and the author of 300 scientific articles and 15 books. He is a council member of the Royal Society of Chemistry and of The Royal Institution.
Davie believes that computer-aided drug discovery (CADD) is set to undergo massive change: “The availability, through cloud computing, of effectively unlimited computing resource gives CADD practitioners the prospect of working without the compromises inflicted on them, since the dawn of the science, by inadequate hardware systems. The burden now is on developers to design and create a new wave of software systems, to take full advantage of this enormous power and to bring appropriate rigor to CADD. InhibOx is clearly ahead of this wave.”
About InhibOx
InhibOx delivers novel and effective computational methods for drug discovery to improve the productivity of lead and candidate identification and optimization. The company was founded by Professor W. Graham Richards, former Chairman of Chemistry at the University of Oxford and world-leading computational chemist. The company grew from the outstandingly successful Screensaver Lifesaver project which involved some 3.5 million personal computers in over 200 countries: the world's biggest computational chemistry experiment finding lead compounds to inhibit cancer targets, anthrax and smallpox. Since then, InhibOx has built up a proprietary technology platform in computer-aided drug design. Ongoing activities comprise the development of entirely novel computational drug discovery methods; the development of Scopius, a very large and carefully curated database of commercially-available and virtual chemical structures and their delivery to the life science industries.
Contact Details
Email: contactus@inhibox.com
Tel: +44 1865 262000