About Us

Arctoris brings together a world-class team and a revolutionary technology platform.

Our mission

Arctoris is a technology-enabled drug discovery services company headquartered in Oxford and Boston. Arctoris combines its unique automation platform, Ulysses, with a world-class team of seasoned drug hunters to guide and rapidly progress our partners’ drug discovery programs from target to hit, lead, and candidate. Our guiding principles: unparalleled data quality, deep scientific insights, and an agile and client-oriented approach to project management and delivery.

 

Read more about team, technology, and your future with us below.

Our Board

Chair of the Board

Thomas A. Fleming

Board Member

Board Member

Board Member

Board Member

Our team

Our team consists of biotech and pharma veterans, experienced engineers, as well as seasoned life sciences executives. Together, we are your partner in taking a new drug all the way from idea to the clinic.

Thomas A. Fleming

Co-founder and CEO

SALLY CULLEN

Chief People Officer

ANTHONY ROWEN-BROWN

Chief Scientific Officer

KINGA BERCSENYI

Chief Business Officer

POPPY ROWORTH

Chief Operating Officer

Chief Financial Officer

Our advisors

BETH J. HOFFMAN

 Scientific Advisor

Steven Holtzman

Board Advisor

Professor Khusru Asadullah

Scientific Advisor

Scientific Advisor

Scientific Advisor

Stanley Lapidus

Board Advisor

Meet Ulysses

Drug discovery is a series of decision-making steps, driven by data. We developed Ulysses, a unique platform that leverages robotics and wet lab automation to make better decisions based on data of unprecedented quality, depth and context, at scale. With Ulysses, we enable the right decisions at the right time, reducing cycle times, and accelerating the progression from idea to IND, enabling you to bringing new medicines to patients faster.

Contact us to hear discuss how you can leverage Ulysses for your drug development

Our values

We are always looking for our next Arctorian. At Arctoris, we value absolute integrity and trust among our team and our clients. We champion the data, focus on delivering the best-possible data quality, and always ask “how could this be done better?”. We share an obligation to dissent among a strong, mission-driven, diverse team, and we never let a team member fail.

Arctoris is growing. Come join us.

Open roles

There are no open roles at this time, please check back soon.

Ian Shott CBE

Chair of the Board

Ian has held global leadership positions with multinational life science companies (ICI, AstraZeneca, Lonza, ChiRex and Rhodia).  He was also previously co-founder, majority owner, chairman, and managing director of Arcinova, a high-growth CDMO. Ian also served as the managing partner of Shott Trinova, where he invested in a portfolio of life science businesses. Ian is currently a Non-Executive Director of Quotient Sciences, Executive Chairman of Ingenza and a senior adviser to Permira.

Ian has held positions as a member of the Governing Board of Innovate UK and President of the Institution of Chemical Engineers. He was made CBE for services to Chemical Engineering in 2009 and has served as a Specialist Adviser to the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology.

Thomas A. Fleming

Thomas A. Fleming

Co-founder and COO

Tom is a Royal Academy of Engineering SME Leader and was formerly a cancer researcher and Fellow of the Royal Commission of 1851 at the University of Oxford. A chemist by background, he worked both at leading CROs and pharmaceutical corporations. Tom has unique insights into drug discovery, including the critical steps from target identification & validation to high-throughput screening & lead optimization.

Kjell Skappel

Board Member

Kjell has extensive experience from executive and board positions across tech and biotech sectors, including as investor and Chair at P53 Invest AS. Previously he served as Regional Director Europe North at Cisco Systems from 2005 until 2010 and in several management positions in Tandberg, which was acquired by Cisco Systems. In 2010 he founded Stavanger Venture AS, which invests in technology companies. He also has extensive investment experience and in venture capital and portfolio management and is an early investor in Arctoris.

Mark Evans

Board Member

Mark is currently a Partner, LP and Investment Committee member at Kindred Capital, a European seed-stage venture fund, based in London. He was a General Partner at Balderton Capital/Benchmark Europe from 2002 through 2015, and an EIR at Benchmark Capital in 1999/2000.
He spent the prior 15 years at Goldman Sachs, where he was a General Partner and Management Committee member. He studied Economics at both University of Oxford and Queen’s University in Canada. Mark has been a long-term investor in and mentor to Arctoris.

David Knox

Board Member

David Knox is a founding director and shareholder of Future Planet Capital who is inspired by, and committed to working with, the team to address the world’s biggest challenges by connecting investors with outstanding impactful innovation.

Having trained in the fields of medical and actuarial science, David has enjoyed an extensive and successful career in financial services and as an entrepreneur.  He has worked with Munich Re, he became a partner at Cazenove and subsequently Head of Research and a member of the Executive Management Committee at J.P. Morgan Cazenove and he was CEO of Oriel Securities.  He established Lazarus Research, an independent research advisory firm and he holds a number of other directorships.  David is heavily involved in a number of voluntary and charitable roles and he is a keen sportsman.

SALLY CULLEN

Sally Cullen

Chief People Officer

Sally brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to Arctoris. Her passion for people and development ensures we continue to invest in our ambitious talent and culture agenda. Sally has diverse experience in building high performance teams in high growth tech companies. She has been a member of the Chartered Institute for Personnel & Development for over 20 years and is a qualified occupational psychologist.

ANTHONY ROWEN-BROWN

Anthony Rowen-Brown

Chief Scientific Officer

Over 30 years of drug discovery experience in Biotech/Pharma covering all aspects from target ID/validation through pre-clinical development and Ph1/2/3 clinical studies including biomarker and diagnostic development. Experience covers small molecules, biologics and cell-based therapies. Has led 11 programmes through IND into the clinic. Primary focus in oncology, immune-oncology and immune-inflammation. Has held senior positions in both scientific (CSO) & business (CBO) capacities. Experience of leading M&As, in-licensing, financing, private investment and industry/academic grants and has founded a number of start-up Biotechs. Currently Expert in Residence for Drug Discovery at The University of Oxford and sits on the Advisory Boards of two European Biotechs. Holds a D.Phil in Biochemistry from The University of Oxford and an MBA from Oxford Brookes.

KINGA BERCSENYI

Kinga Bercsenyi

Chief Business Officer

Kinga has a PhD from Cancer Research UK and University College London. She completed her Postdoc as a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellow at King’s College London and published in both Nature and Science Magazine. She worked as a BD consultant across translational oncology and precision medicine at Champions Oncology and Cerba Research before joining Arctoris. She is passionate about science communication and patient participation in research.
POPPY ROWORTH

Poppy Roworth

Chief Operating Officer

Poppy completed her DPhil in Oncology at the University of Oxford and her BSc in Biochemistry at the University of Southampton. She worked for AstraZeneca in the Oncology iMED unit, employing robotic systems for drug discovery. Poppy also was a Visiting Researcher at OncoRay-Dresden. She actively promotes women in STEM and has won several awards as a biochemist.

Paul Custance

Chief Financial Officer

A chartered accountant with over 15 years of senior finance leadership experience. Previous positions included positions at PwC and Sony Music and consulting roles supporting startups and scaleups with fundraising and financial strategy.

BETH J. HOFFMAN

Beth J. Hoffman

Advisory Board Member

Beth Hoffman PhD is a seasoned pharmaceutical and biotech executive. Beth is the CEO of San Diego-based Origami Therapeutics. During her distinguished career she has also served as Vice-President of Discovery Biology at Vertex Pharmaceuticals and held leadership positions at Amgen, Eli Lilly, and the NIH. Beth brings invaluable experience in drug
discovery and development, both from the R&D and business perspective.

Steven Holtzman

Steven Holtzman

Board Advisor

Steven is an internationally recognized leader in the biopharma space. He was the CEO of Decibel Therapeutics, CEO & Founder of Infinity Pharmaceuticals, Chief Business Officer of Millennium Pharmaceuticals, and also served as EVP of Corporate Development at Biogen. Steven advises the board on business strategy, the commercial and competitive landscape, and asset-based value-generation.

Professor Khusru Asadullah

Professor Khusru Asadullah

Advisory Board Member

Professor Asadullah is an expert in translational medicine and former Vice-President & Head of Target Discovery at Bayer. He spent more than 15 years as pharma executive, authored 160 publications and led the industry-changing Bayer reproducibility study. Professor Asadullah advises the board on translational and precision medicine, data standards, and drug discovery best practices.

John Davis

Advisory Board Member

John Davis is the Chief Scientific Officer of the Centre for Medicines Discovery (Oxford) and Director of Business Development for the Alzheimer’s Research UK – Drug Discovery Alliance. He has over 25 years of drug discovery expertise all the way from target identification to successful clinical proof of concept for a range of drug candidates in neurological disorders. Following postdoctoral training at the Ludwig Institute and the Salk Institute, he joined GlaxoSmithKline where he led a variety of non-clinical pharmacology research departments for pain and neurodegenerative diseases. In 2010, Professor Davis co-founded the spinout company Convergence Pharmaceuticals, which he later left to become Director of Discovery for Selcia, and CSO and cofounder of Cypralis before joining the University of Oxford.

Teodoro Laino

Advisory Board Member

Teodoro Laino leads the chemical computation and automated synthetic chemistry efforts at the Department of Cognitive Computing and Industry Solutions at the IBM Research Zurich Laboratory. He is interested in the application of machine learning to chemistry and materials science problems with the purpose of developing scalable, tech-enabled solutions to significantly improve chemical synthesis (e.g., IBM RXN for chemistry). A chemist by background, Dr Laino has a PhD in computational chemistry, after which he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Zurich developing algorithms for molecular dynamics simulation.

Stanley Lapidus

Stanley Lapidus

Board Advisor

Stan is a highly successful biotech and medtech entrepreneur and life sciences pioneer with over 30 granted patents. He took two companies from foundation to NASDAQ: EXACT Sciences (EXAS) and Cytyc Corporation (CYTC), bought by Hologic for $6.2 billion. Stan holds an academic appointment at MIT and advises the board on business strategy and the regulatory environment.