Interview: Medicines and meteorites

Tony Baxter has more than 28 years of experience in management and research in drug discovery, medicinal chemistry services, biomolecule detection instrumentation, and ADMET contract research organisations. He started his career at Glaxo Group Research (now GSK) and Ciba Central Research (now Novartis).

In addition to heading Cyprotex, Baxter is currently Non-Executive Chairman of Equinox Pharma, a spin-out from Imperial College, London focused on the development of ‘machine learning’ for iterative and multi-parametric drug discovery projects. He is also Non-Executive Chairman of Glythera, a Newcastle-upon-Tyne-based spin-out from the University of Bath, which has novel protein glycosylation techniques as its technology base.

Baxter is proud of the fact that he’s never been unemployed. ‘I’ve always managed to find work,’ he says. ‘I’m a chemist by training and the management and business skills that I have learned have been transportable from job to job. I wasn’t bothered that Cyprotex was out of my comfort zone when I became CEO – there were people in the company who had the expertise to tell me what I needed to know.’

He is also proud that he has worked on many drug discovery programmes, of which five resulted in a drug being brought to market, including Everidge, a treatment for basal cell carcinoma.

When Cyprotex was founded in 1999, 40% of all drugs were failing in human clinical trials because of ADME failures. As clinical trials are the most expensive part of bringing a new drug to market, this made ADME the single largest cause of inefficiency in drug development. Founder David Leahy’s dream for Cyprotex was two-fold: to eliminate this waste by predicting the ADME properties of any drug candidate molecule without having to put that molecule into a human or animal; and to become the world’s largest contract research organisation (CRO) specialising in ADMET.