Scientific Advisory Board
Ray Fisher, CEO
Ray is the majority shareholder of Peakdale and founded the Company in 1992. Holding the position
of CEO, Ray drives forward the Company’s ambitious sales programme.
Ray is a well known figure in the industry, with over 20 years research experience in synthetic organic
chemistry. Ray obtained his PhD in organofluorine chemistry with UMIST and has been named as the inventor on a number of patents.
Matt Tozer, Director of Medicinal Chemistry Services
Matt worked for 7 years as Director of Medicinal Chemistry at Medivir, where he
was instrumental in establishing a research strategy that delivered a number of robust
development compounds into the company’s pipeline. He also played a major role in brokering
and managing a number of collaborations with major pharmaceutical and biotechnology
companies. While there he directed work on a variety of protease and anti-viral programmes
leading to compounds that have moved into clinical development.
Matt has a 1st class honours degree and a PhD from Imperial College London, where he worked with
Professor William Motherwell. His post-doctoral research was at the Australian National University
with Professor Athel Beckwith and then at Oxford University with Professor Sir Jack Baldwin. Following
on from these studies, Matt worked for 7 years at the James Black Foundation, specialising in drugs
that modulated G-protein coupled receptors.
Paul Doyle, Director of Technology
From 1981 to 1996, Paul held a variety of senior positions in research for the Wellcome Foundation at Beckenham in Kent, culminating in Senior Research Scientist for the Drug Discovery Unit.
Paul was most recently Technical Director at BioFocus (now BioFocus DPI, a Galalpagos company) where between 1997 and 2003, he was a founding scientist and Director of Chemistry.
Paul holds a degree in chemistry from New College, Oxford and achieved his D.Phil. at the University of Sussex in 1981. He has previously been Secretary to the UK Peptide and Protein Group and was one of the instigators of the BioMolecular Structure Unit at the University of Sussex.
Terry Hart
Terry has over 20 years experience in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry both in research and in senior management roles. He has served with two of the top pharma companies: RPR (Rhône Poulenc Rorer) and most recently Novartis as lead of a team of medicinal chemists. Whilst at Novartis Terry was the co-inventor on the patents for compounds which have entered clinical development for pain, schizophrenia and anxiety. He also served on the committee responsible for running the Novartis Institute in London and the management of the Nervous System portfolio and was a core member of the Global Discovery Chemistry team, which was responsible for the D2 and D3 activities of over 600 chemists worldwide.
Terry joined Peakdale in August 2005 bringing his extensive experience of pharmaceutical R&D in all phases from early target discovery through to clinical trials, together with his knowledge of leading research teams in many different disease areas, including cardiovascular, oncology, respiratory and nervous system diseases.
David Cavalla
David is CEO of Arachnova, a company the he founded in 1998. Previously, he was for 10 years Head of Biosciences at Napp Pharma. David did his degree and PhD at Cambridge University and spent 3 years as a visiting post-doctoral Fellow at the Laboratory of Preclinical Pharmacology at the National Institute of Mental health in Washington DC before joining GSK as a Principal Research Chemist.
Geoff Lawton
Dr Geoff Lawton has extensive experience in new medicine discovery across many therapeutic areas in both large and small companies and is a co-inventor of a marketed drug (Cilazapril).
In a long career with Roche his roles included Director of Chemistry within Roche UK, and Vice-president Chemistry and Preclinical Sciences at Roche Bioscience, Palo Alto, USA.
Since 2001 Geoff has provided scientific and strategic evaluation and advice on drug discovery as an independent consultant for a number of different organisations.
From 2003 to 2007 he was Research Director with Lectus Therapeutics building from start-up a robust drug discovery organisation generating the team, facilities and project portfolio producing the next generation of ion channel modulating medicines.