Barry is Professor of Biological and Medicinal Chemistry in the Department of Pharmacology at Oxford University and a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator. Until recently he was Professor of Medicinal and Biological Chemistry at the University of Bath for over 20 years, and where he now holding a Visiting Professorship. He co-founded Sterix Ltd. with Dr. Normanton and has won six major prizes and medals, both academic and industrial, including: the 2009 GlaxoSmithKline International Achievement Award, the 2009 RSC Interdisciplinary Medal and he was “Investigator of the Year” at the 2012 European Life Sciences Awards. His research is at the Chemistry-Biology and Chemistry-Medicine interfaces, in Signal Transduction, Anticancer Drug Discovery and Translational & Molecular Medicine. He specialises in Chemical Biology and small molecule SAR and has pioneered several medicinal chemistry programmes that have led to clinical leads in oncology, women’s health, diabetes and obesity. Professor Potter is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and the Royal Society of Biology, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (2008) and Member of Academia Europaea (2009)

John has been involved in the commercial development of aspects of the portfolio since early 1990. He has worked in academia, SME’s and the corporate sector in scientific research, clinical development, technology transfer and IP, strategic project planning and general management. A neuroscientist by training, since leaving his faculty position at Oxford University he has worked for Sandoz (now Novartis), a 3i plc subsidiary, Imperial College Innovations and the Ipsen Group. In 1998 he co-founded and was COO of Sterix Limited, a collaborative spin-out between Imperial College, London and the University of Bath which raised £8M in a Series A financing, signed multi - £million licence agreements and successfully exited by trade sale to Ipsen in 2004, turning over in excess of £30M in its lifetime and returning over £24M to its founding universities in research funding, etc. He is a specialist in pharma business development and in-/out-licensing as well as in strategic IP management and commercial project planning which he pursues through a consultancy company, Oxandia Limited, of which he is founder and Managing Director.