Best Startup
At Best Startup UK we track over 130,000 UK startups and over 500,000 people who hold key positions in these companies. We use this directory of startups to highlight top employees, founders and board members we think deserve more appreciation than they are currently getting.
This list showcases the top Oxford based Founder operating in the Pharmaceutical space. If you think a Founder is missing from this list, feel free to contact our editor on editor@beststartup.co.uk.
The individuals on this list have been included because of exceptional performance in one of the following categories:
- Innovation – Operating as a key part in an extremely innovative business or startup.
- Growth – Operating as a key figure in the growth and upscale of a market leading business or startup.
- Management – Showing exceptional management skills.
- Societal impact – Putting their business on the map for their positive societal or environmental impact.
Our Data – We source our data from OSINT (open source intelligence) and public directories such as Companies House UK, Crunchbase, SemRush and many more. The data from these sources should be treated with a degree of caution and verified yourself.
Sebastian Brunemeier
Founder & COO of Samsara Therapeutics
Sebastian Brunemeier is the Founder and COO of Samsara Therapeutics.
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About Cyclone Therapeutics, Samsara Therapeutics, U.S. Department of State, University of Oxford: Samsara Therapeutics is a biopharmaceutical company that aims to discover therapeutics to treat rare genetic and neurodegenerative disease.
Andrew Hopkins
Co-Founder and CEO of Exscientia
Andrew spent 10 years at Pfizer, where he was responsible for establishing new research foci including the concepts of druggability and network pharmacology. Andrew has raised a total of $50 million for academic and commercial research activities in his continuing role as Chair of Medicinal Informatics at the University of Dundee. He is the author of some of the most highly cited papers in modern drug discovery.
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About Exscientia, Kinetic Discovery Ltd.: Exscientia is a pharmatech company that uses an end-to-end AI platform to design and discover new drugs.
Soren Krogsgaard Thomsen
Co-Founder, CEO and Managing Director of BioMe Oxford
Soren is a medical scientist at the University of Oxford, with a background in the natural sciences and genetics research. He previously worked as a consultant for pharma and OBR consulting, and has published on his experiences as an academic entrepreneur. Soren’s current research is focused on translating large-scale genetic data into mechanisms for disease to inform new therapeutic strategies. He dreams of one day enabling similar population-wide microbiome studies using the platform technology under development at BioMe Oxford Ltd.
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About BioMe Oxford, Vertex Pharmaceuticals: Unlocking your gut microbiome by developing a medical device for targeted and non-invasive sampling
Patrick Albers
Co-Founder and Head of Technology of BioMe Oxford
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About BioMe Oxford, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute: Unlocking your gut microbiome by developing a medical device for targeted and non-invasive sampling
Martin-Immanuel Bittner
Co-Founder & CEO of Arctoris
Martin-Immanuel Bittner MD DPhil is a clinician-scientist and life sciences entrepreneur. He is a Rhodes scholar, an active member of several leading cancer research organisations, and an elected member of the Young Academy of the German National Academy of Sciences. Martin is a Co-Founder & CEO of Arctoris, the world’s first fully automated drug discovery platform.
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About Arctoris: Arctoris is a tech-enabled platform company in biotechnology, combining robotics & data science to accelerate drug discovery.
Thomas Fleming
Co-Founder & COO of Arctoris
Thomas Fleming is an award-winning chemist, cancer researcher, and SME Leader of the Royal Academy of Engineering. Tom is the Co-Founder & COO at Arctoris.
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About Arctoris: Arctoris is a tech-enabled platform company in biotechnology, combining robotics & data science to accelerate drug discovery.
Mark Larkin
CEO and Founder of Vitaccess
Mark Larkin founded Vitaccess in 2017, after more than 15 years in consultancy, with the aims of harnessing the power of digital technology to better represent the voice of patients in drug development and market access. Mark has a BA, MA and PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK.
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About Vitaccess: Digital healthcare company providing biopharma clients with real-time insights into patients’ lives via innovative global studies
Sarah Gilbert
Co-Founder & Professor of Vaccinology of Vaccitech
Professor Sarah Gilbert is Professor of Vaccinology at Oxford University and the programme director for a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award on Human and Veterinary vaccines at the Jenner Institute. She is a member of the Oxford University Clinical Biomanufacturing Facility management committee, and an acknowledged expert in the preclinical and clinical development of viral vectored vaccines.Professor Gilbert’s chief research interest is the development of vaccines that work by inducing strong and protective T cell responses, in addition to working on the development of the viral vector platform technology and its application in rapid vaccine development for emerging pathogens.
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About Vaccitech: Vaccitech is creating novel vaccines that elicit strong responses from helper and cytotoxic T-cells.
Idlir Liko
Co-Founder & CTO of OMass Technologies
Idlir Liko is currently the founder and Technology Director of OMass Therapeutics. He received a Master’s Degree from ETH Zurich in 2012 and DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2015, supervised by Prof. Dame Carol Robinson where he focused on the effect ligands and PTMs have on structure and stability of membrane proteins. His work was been featured in many high-impact publications. He has a wealth of experience in structural MS working in close collaboration with biotech and pharmaceutical companies. In 2016, he co-founded the company and has played a key role in transferring our technology from academia to industry.
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About OMass Technologies: OMass Technologies is a drug discovery company exploiting novel mass spectrometry platforms to develop therapeutics.
Paul Townsend
Founder of Karus Therapeutics
Paul Townsend is Founder at Karus Therapeutics.
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About Aptamer Group, Deep Med IO, Karus Therapeutics, Manchester Cancer Research Centre, University of Surrey: Karus is a pharmaceutical company focused on the design and development of molecular-targeted, small molecule drugs to treat cancer.
