Jonathan Engler
Jonathan Engler was born in 1965 in Manchester. He qualified in Medicine at Aberdeen University; after several years practising medicine he moved into a clinical research position at Boots Pharmaceuticals. Together with a colleague, he spotted a gap in the market in that Information Technology was being dramatically underutilised in the drug development process. This saw the birth of ClinPhone plc, a company that specialised in providing software services to automate the clinical trial process. This grew to a company of over 500 employees in six countries. The Company was sold to a NASDAQ-quoted US Corporation in 2006. Following the sale of the company in 2006, Jonathan re-trained in law and practiced as a barrister for a short period before returning to the business world. Jonathan became the CEO of Imagen Therapeutics in 2013, focusing the company on developing its personalised chemotherapy service, which sits at the core of its business.
Steve Kent
Steven is a qualified accountant and holds a Business Studies degree from what is now the University of East Anglia. He started his career as an accountant, working in Pharmaceuticals, Retail and IT in progressively more senior roles. In 1999, Steven became Managing Director of ntl: and moved to Belgium to help establish the nascent ntl: carrier business. Steven returned to the UK in 2002, joining ClinPhone Ltd, a company backed by HG Capital and Montague Equity. He worked for the two founders as Finance Director initially before taking over as Managing Director, broadening the services portfolio and geographic coverage to grow ClinPhone rapidly. Parexel acquired ClinPhone and Steven was asked to lead the combined business. Upon leaving Parexel, Steven joined Phlex Global, a business backed by Inflexion, as Non Exec Chairman. Phlex provides software assisted services collating the Clinical Trial Master Files for Pharmaceutical clients and has 300 employees based in the UK and US. The business was sold in 2014 and Steven left to become Non Exec Chairman of Imagen Therapeutics. Steven is also Non Exec Chairman of CRF Health, a business backed by Verdane Capital. CRF Health delivers a solution to Pharmaceutical companies that uses smartphones and tablets to record key clinical data on patients in clinical trials. CRF has 250 employees in the UK, US and Finland.
Rod Benson
Dr Benson completed his PhD at the University of Manchester, examining several cytological conditions that occur when cells commit to apoptosis. In 2001, he obtained an 18 month Wellcome Showcase award for Innovative research where he explored the use of intrabodies tagged to fluorescent proteins to create an in-cyto immunoassay. The idea went by the acronym LADDERS (Live Antigen Detection Dual Epitope Reporter System). In 2003, he started working for AstraZeneca where he was employed in the Systems Biology group. He left AZ in October 2007 to set up Imagen Therapeutics (formerly Imagen Biotech), a first class High Content screening service, with his colleague Gareth Griffiths. Since 2013, Rod has been working on implementing the workflow at Imagen Therapeutics for the application of High Content Screening to the personalization of chemotherapy. In particular, Rod has continued to develop the IT infrastructure to support this endeavour, including the automation of the dosing, staining and data analysis protocols that are used to deliver the final data package. Rod also assists Gareth Griffiths and Jonathan Engler in the continued building of a strong network of clinicians who both understand our vision and want to be involved in the work necessary to bring High Content-based personalized chemotherapy to the marketplace.
Gareth Griffiths
Dr Griffiths’ career started out in academia and gave him many years postdoctoral experience. Subsequently, he took a challenging role in industry in the field of Systems Biology. Working in this field led him to specialise in High Content Analysis, which is highly compatible with generating the very rich data sets required for Systems Biology. Promotion to a position central to the High Content Screening facility within AstraZeneca provided him with a deep understanding of its usage and benefits across a large number of diverse projects. He gained hands on experience in a whole array of algorithms for analysing images and now has expert knowledge in this area. His desire was to form his own company based around these skills and so he left AstraZeneca to become Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Imagen Therapeutics (formerly Imagen Biotech). Since working for Imagen Therapeutics, Gareth has developed many new and exciting phenotypic screening assays, including a detailed morphology assay that can successfully cluster chemotherapeutic compounds. Gareth is also the creator of the main assay we now use to measure the cell death response of primary patient samples. This assay is not antibody-based, meaning that it can be conducted in both 2D and 3D culture modes.
Richard Goldstein
Richard Goldstein graduated from the University of Cambridge with a degree in Law in 1983. He went on to qualify and practice as a Solicitor in London, specialising in company, commercial and M&A work at the leading law firm Herbert Oppenheimer Nathan & Vandyke. After a period as Legal Counsel at Superdrug Stores PLC, he then undertook further graduate studies, obtaining an MBA with Distinction from INSEAD in France in 1990. Since that time, Richard has been involved in a large variety of corporate and investment activities. He led the buy-in, and subsequently the executive management, of Harding Brothers Limited, now the second-largest global operator of retail environments on board luxury cruise ships. Since relinquishing his executive responsibilities for purchasing, logistics and commercial affairs at Harding Brothers, which has since been sold, Richard has operated and managed the investment activities of a family investment office. He acts in certain cases as a non-executive director of its direct private equity holdings, which include Imagen Therapeutics.