ValiRx PLC, a life science company focused on early-stage cancer therapeutics and women’s health, has made three senior appointments to its newly incorporated subsidiary company, Inaphaea BioLabs (Inaphaea).
Headquartered in MediCity Nottingham, Inaphaea will offer a wide range of pre-clinical and drug discovery testing services to academic, biotech and pharmaceutical researchers, forming the foundation of ValiRx’s tCRO™ (translational Contract Research Organisation) strategy.
In response to the company’s growth, ValiRx has appointed Dr Andrew Carnegie as Head of Strategic Commercial Development. With more than 17 years’ business and commercial development experience in the biotech and life sciences sectors, Andrew will lead Inaphaea’s growth strategy and secure third-party business. He will also ensure the tCRO™ provides testing services that help to achieve improved translation of drug candidates and are of greatest relevance to prospective customers.
Also joining the Inaphaea team is Melissa Barr as Lead Scientist, and Dr Dominic Lowen as Senior Scientist.
Dr Suzy Dilly, ValiRx CEO, said: “After a great deal of hard work by the entire ValiRx team, I am really pleased to announce the official formation of Inaphaea BioLabs, which represents the first step of our longer-term ambition to create a unique tCRO service offering for early-stage drug development. Over the next few weeks, we intend to transfer our own projects into the Inaphaea laboratories to continue their progress.
“I’m also delighted that Andrew has come on board on a permanent basis to support the initiation of service provision through Inaphaea, having supported us through our commercial advisory board over the past year. With the appointments of experienced scientists Dominic and Melissa, we are already well on our way to building a first-class scientific team, and the operational team will continue to grow as activity increases.”
Dr Andrew Carnegie said: “I’m really excited to have the opportunity to play a major role in launching and growing a much-needed service in translational research. After working for many years in commercial development in the biotech industry, I have a good appreciation of the challenges for drug developers and fully support the ambition of Inaphaea to address a clear gap in the market.”
Inaphaea’s laboratories are targeted to be fully operational within Q2 2023, with initial services focusing on cancer cell activity; allowing the study of drug candidates in a range of cell lines to elucidate activity, toxicity, and mechanism of action of test molecules.
Dr Suzy Dilly added: “ValiRx plans to add further techniques and novel data generation technologies to the testing portfolio, together with data analysis and application expertise, with the aim of providing deep biological understanding of drug candidates and help design effective clinical trials.
“Such new capabilities will be fully validated on in-house projects, before offering to external users. In due course, Inaphaea intends to build on ValiRx’s expertise in building specific tests that support the development of treatments in the area of women’s health.”
