This event has been rescheduled from 1 February due to train strikes that day.
Join us for the next FoNS Founders Forum (FFF), hosted by the Faculty’s IPC team and Professor David Klug (Associate Dean for Enterprise).
The Forum aims to develop a vibrant community of entrepreneurs and academics engaged in impact beyond academe. This informal grouping is open to all academic staff, particularly those who are either active or curious about commercialisation and/or increasing the non-academic impact of their work. The intention is to create a self-supporting community of academic entrepreneurs able to provide, guidance, advice, experience, contacts and support to each other.
Business leaders and Imperial academics will be invited to come together over a series of forum sessions to share knowledge in entrepreneurship, engage in networking and create connections.
For the first FFF in-person session, we will have a panel of five speakers and Professor David Klug as a host/chair of the event. Three academics who have been through the process of finding entrepreneur partners and two entrepreneurs who have worked with academics in start-ups. The theme will be academic spinouts hiring industry professionals.
Agenda
17.00 – 17.30 Arrival
17.30 – 18.30 Panel Discussion
18.30 – 20.00 Networking
Speaker biographies
Professor Ed Tate
Prof. Edward (Ed) W. Tate PhD FSRC FRSB, Imperial College London, UK
Department of Chemistry, Molecular Sciences Research Hub, London, W12 0BZ and The Francis Crick Institute, 1 Midland Rd, London NW1 1AT
Visit the Tate Group website.
Keywords
chemical biology, chemical proteomics, post-translational modification, protein degradation, target identification, drug discovery, activity-based probes
Biography
Ed is Professor of Chemical Biology at Imperial College London, a Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute, and academic founder of Myricx Pharma, a spinout developing his lab’s research into clinical applications. Following his PhD (2000) with Steve Ley in Cambridge and postdoctoral research in Paris as an 1851 Fellow and Howard Trust Fellow, he was awarded a BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship in 2006 to start his group at Imperial College. He sits on the advisory boards of several international research institutes and biotechs, and co-develops drug discovery technologies with companies including Pfizer, Merck, GSK, AstraZeneca, Kura Oncology, and ADC Technologies. His research has been recognised by multiple awards and Fellowships, most recently the 2019 Sir David Cooksey Translation Prize, the 2020 Corday-Morgan Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a Cancer Research UK Programme Award.
Abstract
The Tate lab develops novel chemical biology approaches to enable drug discovery against post-translational modification (PTM) pathways and intractable drug targets, including chemical proteomic target identification, screening technologies, and chemical probe discovery for protein-protein interactions and enzymes modulating PTMs. Recent highlights include the first cell-active activity-based probes (ABPs) for deubiquitinases (DUBs), new tools for analysis and discovery of pathogenic secreted protease activities and the first comprehensive maps of specific classes of protein lipidation PTM through chemical proteomics. We are also interested in new modalities including antibody-PROTAC conjugates, and translation of ultrapotent chemical probes into drug candidates.
Professor Pantelis Georgiou
Prof. Pantelis Georgiou received the M.Eng. degree in electrical and electronic engineering and the Ph.D. degree from Imperial College London (ICL), London, U.K., in 2004 and 2008, respectively.
He is currently a Professor of Biomedical Electronics with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, ICL, where he is also the Head of the Bio- Inspired Metabolic Technology Laboratory, Centre for Bio-Inspired Technology.
His research includes bio-inspired circuits and systems, CMOS based Lab-on-Chip technologies, and application of microelectronic technology to create novel medical devices. He has made significant contributions to integrated chemical-sensing systems in CMOS, conducting pioneering work on the development of ISFET sensors, which has enabled applications, such as point-of-care diagnostics and semiconductor genetic sequencing and has also developed the first bio-inspired artificial pancreas for treatment of Type I diabetes using the silicon-beta cell.
He received the IET Mike Sergeant Medal of Outstanding Contribution to Engineering in 2013. In 2017, he was also awarded the IEEE Sensors Council Technical Achievement award. He is a member of the IET and serves on the BioCAS and Sensory Systems technical committees of the IEEE CAS Society. He is also on the IEEE Sensors council as a member at large and an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer. He is Co-founder and CEO of ProtonDx, commercialising technologies for rapid diagnostics for infectious diseases.
Neil Morris
Neil has over 35 years of international operations, business and commercial experience in the energy sector. He joined BP plc in 1985 and held a range of senior executive management positions including Head of Engineering and Technology for BP’s Global Refining Business
After leaving BP Neil was Chief Executive Officer of a privately owned oil company with refining and trading operations in Germany, London and Geneva.
In 2018 he was appointed as the first Chief Executive Officer of the Faraday Institution, a UK government funded organisation for battery research. He now has a small portfolio of non-executive roles, including Chairman of About:Energy, a battery software modelling company spun out from Imperial College and the University of Birmingham in 2021 and is also a non-executive director of Guided Ultrasonics Ltd a global leader in the provision of guided wave pipe testing equipment established in 1999 by researchers from Imperial College’s Mechanical Engineering Department.
Neil holds a first-class degree in chemical engineering from Loughborough University and an MBA from Edinburgh University. He is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the Institute of Chemical Engineers.
Chris Guyott
Chris Guyott is an alumnus of IC having studied in the Mechanical Engineering department in the 1980s. He has over 30 years’ experience of operating in a commercial consultancy environment and working at company board level.
He helped grow the business from 30 to over 700 employees, lead their technology and service development strategy and set up several business units to underpin the growth. He is keen to promote innovation and believes that building and maintaining collaborations between industry and academia is key to economic growth.
Dr Chiara Heide
Chiara is the founder and CEO of P.Happi, a female-led, venture capital funded biotech start-up developing pioneering microbiota solutions for urinary health and beyond. Frustrated with the lack of innovation in the female health space, Chiara started the company after completing her PhD in synthetic biology/bioengineering at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London (ICL) in 2020.
She studied Advanced Chemical Engineering at ICL, and did her undergraduate in Chemistry at UC Berkeley, University of Potsdam and ETH. She was a Marit Mohn/Departmental Scholar, and Scholar of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation.
While studying at Imperial, Chiara founded a supportive network for female academics ‘WOMENinSTEM@IC’ to improve retention of women in STEMM careers.