Our People
Dr Stuart Collinson
Chairman and CEODr Stuart Collinson
Chairman and CEO
Dr Collinson’s career includes executive leadership and board roles with public and private life science companies in the US and Europe, and as a partner with a venture capital firm.
He has served on the boards of companies including Affinium Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Debiopharm), Cabrellis Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Pharmion, now part of Celgene), Conforma Therapeutics (acquired by Biogen), Essentialis (acquired by Capnia, now Soleno Therapeutics), GeneOhm Sciences (acquired by Becton Dickinson), NovaCardia (acquired by Merck & Co), and Vertex Pharmaceuticals.
As a life science partner with Forward Ventures, Dr Collinson has led investments in numerous biopharmaceutical companies. Previously, he was Chairman and CEO of Aurora Biosciences (acquired by Vertex Pharmaceuticals). He held senior management positions at GlaxoWellcome (now GlaxoSmithKline) and Baxter International, and was a consultant with The Boston Consulting Group.
Dr Collinson received an MBA from Harvard Business School (Fulbright Scholar), a DPhil (PhD) in Physical Chemistry from the University of Oxford.
Dr Andy Mulvaney
Chief Operating OfficerDr Andy Mulvaney
Chief Operating Officer
Dr. Andy Mulvaney has 17 years’ biotech experience in operational, business development and alliance management roles, most recently as Vice President, Business Development at Summit Therapeutics plc (NASDAQ: SMMT; AIM: SUMM). In 2003 he co-founded VASTox Ltd., now Summit Therapeutics plc, with Professor Stephen Davies and Professor Dame Kay Davies to develop utrophin modulation as a disease-modifying strategy for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. Andy initially served as Chief Operating Officer and in October 2004 was instrumental in the successful IPO of VASTox on the AIM segment of the London Stock Exchange. From 2006, Andy focussed on strategic partnering and completed a number of global and regional licensing transactions, acquisitions and divestments, with deal values exceeding $1.3Bn. Andy is a member of the Pharmaceutical Licensing Group.
Andy was a postdoctoral fellow in the Dyson Perrins Laboratory, University of Oxford, working with Professor Stephen Davies, establishing the group’s activities in utrophin modulation, chemical genetics and combinatorial chemistry. Andy holds a Ph.D. from Cardiff University where he studied homogeneous catalysis using organometallic complexes, having been awarded a prestigious fully funded scholarship by open competition from ICI.
Dr Ian Churcher
Chief Scientific OfficerDr Ian Churcher
Chief Scientific Officer
Ian has led a range of drug discovery teams in both large pharma and biotech environments moving projects from discovery to clinic and developing new technologies to address long-standing drug discovery questions. Ian was recently SVP Drug Discovery at Benevolent AI where he led the London drug discovery group, applying a range of artificial intelligence approaches to advance a portfolio of projects from target validation, chemistry optimisation and clinical entry across therapy areas. Prior to this, he led the Protein Degradation Discovery Performance Unit at GSK, one of the pioneering groups who, working with Prof Craig Crews, demonstrated for the first time the successful application of PROTAC approaches to drug discovery. Ian has also held a number of leadership roles in GSK and Merck across areas as diverse as fragment-based drug design, chemical biology and new target identification, screening collection design as well as delivery of clinical candidates across multiple therapy areas. Ian has also held a visiting professor position in the Department of Chemistry, University of Oxford from where he holds an MA and DPhil in chemistry.
Raymond Spencer
Chief Financial OfficerRaymond Spencer
Chief Financial Officer
Raymond Spencer, CFO has over 30 years’ experience as a senior financial officer in biotech. For 12 years he was the CFO of LSE listed Antisoma plc. Whilst at Antisoma he was instrumental in completing the IPO in 1998, several fund-raising rounds that totalled over £100 million, the acquisition of two private US biotech companies and the closing of three licensing deals with big pharma with total upfront licence fees exceeding £100m.
Raymond was CFO for AIM listed Summit plc for 5 years to July 2014 having completed a restructuring of the company, raised over £20m in equity financing and the acquisition of the Oxford University spin-out MuOx Ltd. Raymond is currently part-time founder, Director and CFO of MGB-Biopharma Ltd, which has raised over £6m from angel investors, Scottish Enterprise and won a Biomedical Catalyst award from Innovate UK to progress drugs for treatment of anti-microbial resistance. He has also established his own consultancy company, Bio-CFO Ltd providing services to biotech and cleantech companies. Raymond qualified as a chartered accountant with KPMG in 1979.
Dr Graham Wynne
VP ResearchDr Graham Wynne
VP Research
Graham has over 20 years of drug discovery experience gained in small to medium sized biopharma companies and in academia. His work at the University of Oxford has encompassed multiple therapeutic areas, including oncology, muscular dystrophy and regenerative medicine and he has co-founded several companies including MuOx (acquired by Summit Therapeutics) and OxStem Neuro.
Prior to this Graham established and led the medicinal chemistry team at Summit Therapeutics which discovered ezutromid, a potential first-in-class treatment for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy which progressed to Phase 2 clinical trials. In his previous role at OSI Pharmaceuticals Inc his group were responsible for the discovery of OSI-930, a dual kit-KDR kinase inhibitor which progressed into Phase 1 clinical trials. Graham gained his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Nottingham. He has co-authored multiple papers and is an inventor on 40 patents or patent applications.
Dr Lorna Fiedler
Associate Director Alliance and OperationsDr Lorna Fiedler
Associate Director Alliance and Operations
Lorna has 14 years’ experience in the cardiovascular field across biotech and academic sectors. She joined Oxstem in 2017 as a senior scientist before joining the executive team in September 2019.
Lorna previously worked in the biotechnology sector and held a research fellow and project lead position at the Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School, investigating the molecular mechanisms underlying heart failure. She also worked for five years at Imperial College London developing cardioprotective small molecules where she led the biology team, working closely with internal and external industry partners. Her work was featured in FierceBiotech and is published in Cell Stem Cell (Fiedler et al., 2019).
Lorna holds a Ph.D. in vascular biology from Cardiff University and is a qualified Prince2 Practitioner.