DefiniGEN has announced the appointment of Dr Chris Kirton as Chief Executive Officer. Kirton has more than 16 years of operational experience and joined the company as Chief Operating Officer in June 2020. The appointment is key for DefiniGEN as they expand the service portfolio to encompass compound screening.
Kirton began his operational management career by establishing and growing the cell biology and immunology business unit at a global CRO, reportedly offering a range of GxP services with multi-million-pound revenues. He went on to collaborate with Ludovic Vallier to establish the stem cell core facility at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, which delivered the HiPSCi iPSC banking project. Kirton then joined Axol Bioscience as its COO where he led several business transformations and scale up projects.
Dr Ben Cons, Chairman of the Board said: "I am delighted to announce Chris’ promotion to CEO. This is a true reflection of his contributions and will enable the business to continue to expand its drug discovery iPSC solutions for the pharmaceutical industry."
Dr Chris Kirton said: "It is an absolute privilege to be granted the opportunity to support the amazing team at DefiniGEN as their CEO. DefiniGEN have established themselves as a market leader in the provision of wild-type and disease models of induced pluripotent stem cell derived hepatocytes via a combination of in-house gene editing expertise and the patented Opti-DIFF process for hepatocyte differentiation.
“Stem cells and their derived models have now ‘come of age’ and are seen as a key success factor for candidate development within the biotechnology and pharmaceutical communities; this is an exciting time for the field and DefiniGEN will be a leading provider within it. Our clients have already successfully used our models to develop assays supporting the next generation of medicines for the treatment of liver diseases and in the next stage of DefiniGEN’s journey we will now offer many of these models and assays in house via a CRO business model."
