Trevor Twose is Chief Executive and Principal Consultant of Biopons, Inc in Madison, Wisconsin, USA. He is a co-founder and Chief Executive of Mithridion, Inc, a Madison-based company focusing on Alzheimer’s disease therapies. Dr Twose has over 25 years of biomedical business and research experience, covering general management, R&D, business and corporate development, and finance in start-up, development-stage and established pharmaceutical, diagnostics and biotechnology companies. Previously he served as the founding CEO of Scarab Genomics LLC, a spin-out from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, developing improved industrial production strains of E. coli. Prior to that, he was Chief Executive of Medical Solutions plc, a $25m turnover London Stock Exchange-listed medical products group. He was a founder and first CEO of a cancer therapy company EPTTCO (now Proacta Therapeutics, Auckland, New Zealand and Delaware, USA), which brought together science and technology from leading UK and New Zealand cancer researchers. In the first two years, he closed several licensing and strategic alliance agreements for the company with biotechnology and major pharmaceutical companies. Proacta recently completed a Series A venture round of $8m with international investors, including Genentech and Roche. For six years he was with Xenova Group plc, a listed biopharmaceutical company, latterly as a main board director and Chief Financial Officer. During his tenure, he played pivotal roles in raising over $90 million in US and European capital markets, listing the company on Nasdaq in the US and on the London Stock Exchange. Earlier in his career, he was an independent consultant, operating from the UK, with a wide range of US and European clients in the pharmaceutical, diagnostic and biotechnology industries. He was a founder of a new diagnostics division of UK giant, Imperial Chemical Industries plc (now AstraZeneca), and played a pivotal role in launching its subsidiary Cellmark Diagnostics in the USA and Europe to commercialize DNA fingerprinting technology invented by Prof Sir Alec Jeffries at Leicester University in the UK. This technology revolutionized forensic medicine and the business is now the world leader in human identity testing as part of Orchid Biosciences, with more than $60m in revenues in 2004. Dr Twose spent 11 years at ICI (now AstraZeneca) Pharmaceuticals, where he held drug research and development management positions, including leading arthritis, inflammation and immunology research. In Wisconsin he has been a mentor for the Governor’s Business Plan Competition, was on the Selection Committee for the Life Sciences Venture Conference and is a member of the Biomedical Collaborative, based in Greater Madison, and the Fitchburg New Economy Technology Team. He served as a member of the UK government Pharmaceuticals, Biotechnology & Devices Technology Foresight panel, and as a council member and director of the UK Bioindustry Association (BIA). He was Organizing Chairman for the annual BIA conference and Chairman of the Communications Committee of BIA. His PhD is from the University of Manchester, UK, and he trained as a postdoctoral researcher in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI in the USA. He also completed management courses at the Manchester Business School, Ashridge Strategic Management Center, Ashridge Business School and the Henley Management College in the UK. |
