Professor John Atack is a Director of the Medicines Discovery Institute (MDI) at Cardiff University and Founder & Chief Translational Officer of Draig Therapeutics. John is a molecular pharmacologist with extensive (>25 years) experience in neuroscience drug discovery at the Merck Sharp & Dohme Neuroscience Research Centre in Harlow, UK and then with Janssen Pharmaceuticals (now Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine). He has worked on a range of CNS disorders including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, cognitive impairment and addiction. He has a particularly interest in the translational aspects of preclinical drug discovery which give confidence that a particular drug candidate can engage with the target and produce a functional readout in man. As Director of the MDI at Cardiff University he has built a portfolio of drug discovery and clinical development projects that formed the basis of Draig’s innovative pipeline.

Carole Bataille obtained her undergraduate degree in Organic Chemistry at the University of Rouen and PhD on permanganate oxidative cyclisation under Dr R.C.D. Brown at the University of Southampton. She completed two post-doctoral positions at Oxford's Chemistry Research Laboratory with Professor T.J. Donohoe on tethered aminohydroxylation methodology and Dr J.M. Brown on resolution of stereolabile biaryl ligands. Since 2008, Carole has been a senior post-doctoral researcher in Professor Angela Russell's laboratories, working on diverse medicinal chemistry projects including novel PIM kinase inhibitors for cancer treatment, anti-viral agents against Hepatitis C virus, compounds for stem cell proliferation and differentiation, and lipid immunometabolic receptors using metabolic profiling. She has collaborated with Professor TH Rabbitts on synthesising chiral small molecules for protein-protein interactions to prevent cancer cell proliferation using fragment-based approaches. Since 2021, Carole has coordinated an MRC-funded project developing second generation arylhydrocarbon receptor antagonist utrophin modulators for treating Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

David is a drug discovery pharmacologist with extensive experience across the entire drug discovery process, from target validation to early clinical development. He has delivered clinical candidates from multiple target classes across various disease areas, recognised for his strong analytical pharmacology skills. Starting at Wellcome Research Laboratories in 1995, he progressed through GlaxoWellcome and GlaxoSmithKline to become Director of Screening & Compound Profiling in 2006, overseeing a third of GSK's high throughput screening campaigns.

In 2010, David joined the Drug Discovery Unit at the University of Dundee as Head of Biology, developing strategies for hit discovery and lead optimisation programmes. Over 15 years, he has led screening cascades for neglected tropical diseases and developed world diseases, enabling the establishment of six new companies and multiple pharma partnerships. Appointed Professor of Translational Biology in 2019, David was awarded a British Empire Medal in 2021 for establishing and managing the Glasgow COVID diagnostic facility, which delivered over 31 million PCR test results from 2020-2023.

Tim specialises (lives) in the ‘valley of death’, the funding gap between ideas and industry where the analysis, choice, financing, and prosecution of ideas is recognised as difficult and high risk, Tim has extensive experience of multidisciplinary research collaborations involving Academia, Biotech, Investors and Pharma. He currently holds several consultancy and advisory positions with academic organisations and biotech companies, is panel member for MRC DPFS and an SAB member for the ELRIG drug discovery community organisation. Before consultancy, Tim was VP Drug Discovery EntactBio, a successfully funded stealth-mode Biotech startup and was Deputy Director of Drug Discovery at the CRUK Therapeutic Discovery Laboratories (now CRUK Horizons), designing and managing at-scale global Academia-Industry alliances, and accumulating 20+ years experience building and managing drug discovery programmes.

Róisín is Chief Business and Innovation Officer at the UK Dementia Research Institute and has over 20 years’ experience translating scientific discoveries to benefit patients, across government, academic, industry and not-for-profit sectors. Following post-doctoral studies at UCSF's Comprehensive Cancer Center, Róisín worked in biopharma drug discovery before joining Cancer Research Technology (now Horizons) where she spent 13 years leading the commercialisation of academic discoveries. She has led partnership and business development activities within the public sector at CPRD, the MHRA's real world data centre, and the Rosalind Franklin Institute, Harwell; and in the private sector at the leading US oncology liquid biopsy company, Guardant Health and at Ground Truth Labs, a spin-out from the University of Oxford developing AI-enabled biomarker tests.

Professor Peter Parker trained as an undergraduate in Biochemistry (BA) at Oxford and then as a post-graduate in Clinical Biochemistry (D.Phil). He won an MRC Post-Doctoral Fellowship to work with Professor Sir Philip Cohen in Dundee before moving into oncology research with Professor Mike Waterfield at ICRF, then as a founding member of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at UCL. In 1990 he was appointed Principal Scientist at ICRF, which in 2002 evolved to become the London Research Institute (LRI), and moved with the LRI to the Francis Crick Institute in 2015 as Senior Group Leader. He held joint appointments at King's College London from 2006 as Professor of Cancer Cell Biology and Head of the Cancer Division until 2017, he was also Director of the Cancer Research UK King's Health Partners Centre. Peter is currently Emeritus Professor at Francis Crick Institute and at King’s College London.

His team has published over 380 articles in signal transduction, biomarkers and cancer research. His discovery research led to drug development programmes with industrial collaborators, resulting in co-founding three biotech companies. He currently chairs the MRC’s Development Pathway Funding Scheme and GAP funding panels, alongside chairing the Francis Crick’s Crick Science Translation Advisory Committee and serving on the Crick’s Translational Advisory Board. Peter also sits on the Science Advisory Boards of Apollo Therapeutics, HAWK Biosystems and Phoremost.

Dr Ben Porebski is a co-founder and the CEO/CTO of Sortera Bio, which he spun out of the MRC LMB in early 2024. As a postdoctoral scientist at the MRC LMB, he worked with Phil Holliger on developing a novel high throughput drug discovery technology called Deep Screening, which now underpins the commercial activities of Sortera. Ben previously served in the Australian army before training as a biochemist and molecular biologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Here, he worked with Ashley Buckle and Geoff Webb on engineering hyper thermostable proteins using a mixture of computational design methods, x-ray crystallography and in vitro evolution. Ben’s research spans the fields of computational and experimental protein engineering, machine learning, and technology development, typically working at the intersection of multiple scientific and engineering disciplines.

Andy is an entrepreneur and investor with a track record in founding, scaling and successfully exiting  innovative Life-science and Healthtech companies. He is currently Chairman of Arecor Therapeutics plc, RNAvate,  Owlstone Medical and Vice Chair of ieso Digital Health . He is a director of Our Future Health Trading, and an advisor to several investment funds, including Cambridge Innovation Capital, the UCL Technology Fund, StartCodon, and the CRUK Seed Fund. He is a council member of the UKRI Medical Research Council (MRC). Andy is a Cambridge Graduate with a PhD in Chemistry. He started his career with ICI (now AstraZeneca) before coming back to Cambridge in the early days of UK Biotech. He was a founder and executive director of Chiroscience plc until its merger with Celltech in 1999 and since that time he has founded, invested in and helped to scale more than 30 innovative ventures. Andy is a founder member of the Cambridge Angels and received a CBE for services to life-sciences. His passion is getting innovation and science to help patients, and in building the teams and themes to make this happen.

Oliver is an Investment Director at UKI2S. Specialising in high impact biology based investments he has managed life science investments at the UKI2S fund (part of the Future Planet Capital fund group) since the fund’s inception in 2014. He has invested in a broad range of therapeutic companies using complex biology such as gene therapy, RNA, phage and antibody platforms. He has overseen two exits including the sale of Quethera to Astellas. He sits on multiple boards. Prior to joining UKI2S, Oliver worked at the venture fund Imperial Innovations as well as other roles in the biotech industry including BD&L, strategy consultancy and licensing. The UKI2S fund has a small proof of principle allocation from the MRC which it is keen to invest in early stage companies developing MRC backed research.

Professor Alan Stitt is the Harold McCauley Chair in ophthalmology at Queen’s University Belfast. He also serves as Dean of Innovation and Impact in the Faculty of Medicine, Health and Life Sciences (MHLS), and has been leading efforts to improve academic engagement in enterprise, industry partnerships, and entrepreneurship towards translating research into social, economic and clinical impact. His leadership has helped to drive an enterprise culture, with emphasis on the value of knowledge exchange for all researchers. Through his leadership, the MRC IAA has seeded University-wide translational projects and attracted significant follow-on funding from UKRI/Innovate UK, Invest NI, private investors and industry. As Dean, he has worked closely with QUBIS as the university commercialisation arm to encourage and support spin-out company creation. There has been measurable success at a Faculty level and over the last 8 years, MHLS has launched 23 companies, many having been connected to and developed within the Innovate UK iCURE programme. Although at different developmental stages, most of these companies are delivering commercial value and career opportunities for young entrepreneurs.

Professor Simon Ward is a Sêr Cymru Professor in Translational Drug Discovery, Director of the Medicines Discovery Institute (MDI) at Cardiff University and Founder & Chief Scientific Officer of Draig Therapeutics. Simon has wide-ranging experience from over 25 years of drug discovery in senior roles within major pharmaceutical companies, biotech and academia (including GlaxoSmithKline, BioCrea, Knoll Pharmaceuticals, Vernalis, Chiroscience, University of Sussex and Cardiff University). He has led multidisciplinary project teams for a wide range of diseases and has successfully secured over £50M funding to lead a portfolio of drug discovery and clinical development projects. Simon is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), an internationally recognised expert in medicinal chemistry and has held many external roles on scientific advisory boards, charity and government funding panels.