Mr Tovey was Chief Operating Officer of GW Pharmaceuticals plc for 10 years, helping transition the company from a predominantly R&D company to a fully-fledged commercial business following regulatory approvals of its lead products – which were world-firsts in their space. Following the acquisition of GW Pharma for $7.2bn by Jazz Pharmaceuticals, he became Chief Operating Officer and Managing Director of Europe & International until his departure at the end of 2022.
He has over 30 years of commercial leadership and operations experience including at GlaxoSmithKline and UCB where he was Vice President Head Of Global Marketing Operations. Mr Tovey has worked across a wide range of therapeutic areas including infectious diseases, neurology, oncology, diabetes, respiratory and immunology. Mr Tovey holds a BSc. degree in Marine Biology from the University of Liverpool.
Dr Love was a senior scientist at Ciba Geigy/Novartis, focused on novel drug delivery technologies and involved in the development of the world’s leading eye-care pharmaceutical, Visudyne. In 1997, Dr Love founded Destiny Pharma and he is the co-inventor of the XF drug platform. Dr Love is an expert advisory board member of Global AMR Innovation Fund and an expert panellist appointed by the UK government in 2021 to the UKRI Covid-19 preparedness Task Force for Research and Innovation funding and appointed in 2022 to the UKRI UK-China One Health Epidemic Preparedness expert panel. Dr Love is the named inventor in more than 80 patents. He has experience in drug R&D from discovery and lead identification, through pre-clinical development and into Phase 1/2 clinical development in the UK, EU and US.
Mr Claydon is an accomplished corporate financier and qualified Chartered Accountant with over 16 years’ board level experience, including within the biotechnology sector. He has extensive experience of delivering financial and operating results and from 2015 served as CFO of Creabilis, a venture backed clinical stage specialty pharmaceutical company focused on dermatology treatments, during which he led the $150 million sale of the business to Sienna Biopharmaceuticals. From 2009 to 2014 Mr Claydon was CFO and chief operating officer of Orteq Sports Medicine, a medical device company and world leader in the field of biodegradable polymer technologies. Prior to these positions Mr Claydon held a number of senior financial consultancy and corporate finance roles including at PwC, Evolution Beeson Gregory (now Investec) and HSBC Investment Banking.
Dr Barker has worked at Novartis, Roche, GSK (then SmithKline Beecham) and most recently in C-Suite Biotech roles at Polyphor and Polyneuron. Dr Barker is currently Senior Independent Director at Arix Bioscience, a global venture capital company and holds additional Non-Executive Director positions at a number of other biotech companies. At Novartis Dr Barker held several senior roles including Head of Development for Anti-Infectives, Immunology and Transplantation. Dr Barker was also the medical lead for Swiss based anti-infective specialist Polyphor’s highly successful IPO on the SIX Swiss Exchange.