PhoreMost, UK-based biopharmaceutical company dedicated to drugging ‘undruggable’ disease targets, has made two appointments to strengthen its leadership team, as the company positions itself for growth.
Dr Catherine Beech has joined the PhoreMost Board as a Non-Executive Director. Dr Benedict (Ben) Cross has joined as Senior Director (Technology), and will direct the evolution and development of the Company’s SITESEEKER screening platform.
Beech has over 25 years of biotech and pharmaceutical industry experience, including leading drug development programmes in hypertension, heart failure, Parkinson’s Disease and HIV. She has also worked extensively to commercialise novel technologies in the life sciences, and is a scientific founder and CEO of Exonate. Beech has a degree in medicine from the University of Birmingham and in 2008 was awarded an OBE for services to technology and innovation.
Cross is a geneticist and biotechnologist with over ten years of professional research and management experience. He joins PhoreMost from Horizon Discovery, where he established and led the company’s functional genomic screening platform over a period of six years. The screening group now executes hundreds of screens per year, generating multi-million-pound revenue. Cross completed his PhD at the University of Manchester, with postdoctoral training at the University of Cambridge.
Dr Chris Torrance, CEO, PhoreMost, said: “We welcome both Ben and Catherine to the PhoreMost team at this exciting point in the company’s development. We very much look forward to working with Ben to maximise the potential of the SITESEEKER platform, and to the addition of Catherine’s valuable experience and guidance on the Board of Directors.”
Dr Catherine Beech, OBE, Non-Executive Director, PhoreMost, said: “I am absolutely delighted to join the Board of PhoreMost. I believe the company is poised for success, and that 2020 will be a tremendous year on many fronts.”
Dr Ben Cross Senior Director (Technology), PhoreMost, commented: “I am excited to have been given this opportunity to work with PhoreMost and the SITESEEKER platform, which has huge potential to uncover not only previously undruggable targets, but also druggable pockets within those targets. I am very much looking forward to working with the team to drive this forward.”
PhoreMost’s SITESEEKER phenotypic screening platform is based on the company’s core proprietary protein interference, or ‘PROTEINi’, technology.
Using SITESEEKER, PhoreMost probes the entire proteome in a live cell environment for novel druggable targets linked to any chosen disease, using the vast 3-D shape diversity of natural protein fragment (sub-domain) libraries. This enables the systematic unmasking of cryptic druggable sites, directly linking them to useful therapeutic functions.
