Chas Bountra: Innovation at Oxford Artwork

Biotech Frontiers

Biotech Frontiers, the HitGen Podcast, is a series of monthly conversations with leaders at the frontiers of biotech – entrepreneurs, investors, researchers, and policymakers. In each episode we spotlight key people, ideas, and technologies at the forefront of global efforts to improve people’s lives, while providing insight into topics at the intersection of science, business and policy.

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Biotech Frontiers

Chas Bountra: Innovation at Oxford

March 25, 2022 • HitGen • Episode 2

Prof Chas Bountra, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Professor of Translational Medicine at the University of Oxford, joins us in the second episode of Biotech Frontiers for a discussion on the Oxford innovation ecosystem, with a focus on public-private partnerships and initiatives, and the importance of collaboration. Chas draws on his vast experience across industry and academia to suggest ways in which we can better tackle some of the most challenging healthcare problems, such as anti-microbial resistance and the treatment of dementia.

Prof Chas Bountra is Pro-Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Professor of Translational Medicine at the University of Oxford. He is Director of the Centre for Medicines Discovery in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine and Associate Member of the Department of Pharmacology. In addition to this, Chas is an invited expert on several government and charitable research funding bodies, and an advisor for many academic, biotech and pharma drug discovery programmes.

Prior to returning to Oxford in 2008, Chas was Vice President and Head of Biology at GlaxoSmithKline, where he was involved in the identification of >40 clinical candidates for many gastro-intestinal, inflammatory and neuro-psychiatric diseases. He was involved in the launch and development of the first treatment for Irritable Bowel Syndrome (Alosetron) and was the first to show that neurokinin NK1 antagonists are anti-emetic in preclinical and clinical studies.

As Director of SGC-Oxford from 2008 to mid 2020, he established a leading research group in human protein structural biology and epigenetics chemical biology, and arguably one of the most successful open innovation, public-private partnerships in the world.

Chas has given over 400 invited lectures and in 2012 he was voted one of the “top innovators in the industry”. In 2014 received the “Rita and John Cornforth Award” from the Royal Society of Chemistry, and in 2018 was awarded an OBE in the New Years Honours List for services to Translational Medical Research.