Speaker Profiles 29th September 2020
Alan Gemmell O.B.E
Her Majesty's Trade Commissioner, South Asia and British Deputy High Commissioner - Western India
Alan was appointed Her Majesty’s Trade Commissioner for South Asia and the British Deputy High Commissioner for Western India in June 2020.
Prior to his appointment, he was Chief Executive of the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council where he promoted intra-Commonwealth trade working with leading British businesses including: HSBC, JCB, Rolls Royce, Standard Chartered, as well as the City of London, the UK government and a number of governments of Commonwealth countries. Alan was part of a 2019 Commonwealth mission to assess the successful application of the government of Maldives to re-join the Commonwealth.
Alan has worked in Brazil, India, Israel and Mexico with the British Council and was Director of the British Council in India from 2016 to 2018 leading the UK-India Year of Culture and working with State Governments to support education agendas across the country. He has also worked on counter terrorism and preventing extremism in the UK’s Cabinet Office and on economic migration in the Home Office and was awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2016 New Year’s Honours list for services to arts and science.
Harjinder Kang
Director Healthcare, Life Sciences & Bio Economy, Department for International Trade.
Harjinder joined the Civil Service following a private sector career of over 30 years within the global pharmaceutical industry, primarily with AstraZeneca PLC, where he held numerous senior roles. He is the Vice Chair of Sandwell & West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust and has served on the Council of the University of Birmingham.
In 2016 Harjinder founded Abnasia Ltd, an independent consulting firm specialising in providing commercial expertise to global pharma industry and was engaged by many of the top pharma companies to assist them with their strategic commercial issues.
Harjinder is delighted in the opportunity of joining the Department for International Trade to lead this vitally important area of the economy. The pace of innovation in the UK is staggering, and he is immensely proud to be supporting the healthcare, life sciences and bioeconomy sector. He and his team will do everything in their power to help UK companies and institutions achieve even greater success, both within the UK and abroad.
Professor Justin Stebbing
Professor of Cancer Medicine and Oncology, Consultant Oncologist - Imperial College and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.
Professor Justin Stebbing specialises in a range of malignancies, their treatment with immunotherapy (breast, GI and lung and clinical trials), having originally trained in medicine at Trinity College Oxford, where he gained a first class degree. After completion of junior doctor posts in Oxford, he undertook training and a residency programme at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in the US, returning to London to continue his career in oncology at The Royal Marsden and then St Bartholomew's Hospitals. Professor Stebbing’s original PhD research investigated the interplay between the immune system and cancer; he was appointed a senior lecturer in 2007, and a Professor in 2009.
Professor Stebbing has published over 600 peer-reviewed papers in journals such as the Lancet, New England Journal, Blood, the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Annals of Internal Medicine, as well as writing regularly for national newspapers and presenting new data on optimal cancer therapies at the major international conferences. His focus at Imperial is on new therapies in cancer, and the systemic management of patients with solid malignancies including a number of new biomarker-based approaches, with an emphasis on circulating tumour cells and cell free DNA. His laboratory work is concentrated on new druggable target discovery and gene regulation examining the role of non-coding RNAs in stem cells.
He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Pathologists, and sits on the advisory Boards of a number of international cancer committees. He chaired the World Vaccine Congress and the Irish Cancer Society oversight committee and has sat on editorial boards of a number of world leading general medical and cancer journals such as the Journal of Clinical Oncology; he was awarded the Silvia Lawler prize in 2015. Justin's team published in Nature Medicine the discovery of a new cancer-causing gene which we have now implicated in breast, gastro-intestinal, lung and other solid tumours. The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) awarded Justin Stebbing its first translational research professorship in oncology, aiming to bridge the gap between the laboratory and the patient to ensure therapy is personalised. The focus of this is understanding why some patients with cancer relapse, and developing a program to reverse this and prevent it. With the excellent research record we have at Imperial College London and clinical expertise from Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, we believe we are ideally placed to achieve this.
He has an extensive clinical practice and links this to a wide number of translational research studies and immunotherapy trials including recent biosimilar studies. In 2016 Justin was internationally recognised with his appointment as Editor-in-Chief of Oncogene (Springer Nature's foremost cancer journal) and election to the American Society for Clinical Investigation. This year, he has led broad international collaborations to advance COVID-19 research
Dr. Taslimarif Saiyed
CEO & Director, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP)
Dr. Taslimarif Saiyed is the CEO and Director at Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP), an initiative of Dept of Biotechnology, Govt. of India
Dr. Taslim's initial training has been in neurosciences, where he received his PhD from Max-Planck Institute for Brain Research, Germany and followed it up by postdoctoral training at University of California San Francisco (UCSF). At the same time, he also underwent training in management for Biotech and Innovation from QB3 at UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco. In the bay area, he also served as a Management Consultant with QB3 New Biotech Venture Consulting and in an individual capacity, he also consulted for many biotech firms in the US.
Dr. Saiyed is also an Adjunct Faculty at Amrita Institute - School of Biotechnology and working on Neurodegeneration. He also heads the Discovery to Innovation Accelerator program at C-CAMP. He is actively involved in promoting innovation in lifescience / healthcare by supporting translation of discoveries to application, entrepreneurship and technology development.
Dr. Chris Molloy
CEO, Medicines Discovery Catapult UK
In 2016 Chris became the founding CEO of Medicines Discovery Catapult. Chris is the non-executive chairman of Exploristics Ltd and NorthWest EHealth Ltd. He chairs the IP Advisory Committee for the Association of Medical Research Charities, and the Industry Advisory Board for Manchester’s Biomedical Research Centre & Health Innovation Manchester. Chris holds US and EU patents in HIV drug discovery; he is a Member of the Institute of Cancer Research and holds an honorary chair at the University of Manchester.
The Medicines Discovery Catapult is part of a network of Catapults - not-for-profit independent organisations; established by Innovate UK to support UK innovation. Catapults specialise in different areas of technology and offer a space with the facilities and expertise to enable businesses and researchers to collaboratively solve key problems and develop new products and services – taking innovative ideas from concept to reality. The Medicines Discovery Catapult is focused on reshaping the medicine discovery industry.
Dr. Balasubramanya S
Senior Consultant, Biotech - Karnataka Innovation and Technology Society, Department of Electronics, Information Technology, Biotechnology & Science and Technology, Government of Karnataka
Dr. Balasubramanya holds a Ph.D in in Botany from the Bangalore University and has over 22 years of experience together in industry, managing his own business, and with robust exposure to the scientific & academic environment.
He has worked in Sami Labs Ltd., Rishi Herbal Technologies Pvt. Ltd. & Padmashree Institute of Management & Sciences. He was principal investigator/Co-Principal investigator of 5 major research projects funded by National & International agencies. and has published 13 research papers in peer-reviewed national and international journals and a book chapter.
Dr. Bala has a US patent granted and 3 more Indian patents under various stages of filing. He is currently working as a Senior Consultant (Biotech) at the Karnataka Innovation and Technology Society, Dept. of Electronics, IT, BT and S&T, Govt. of Karnataka and is involved in coordinating and implementation of programmes and schemes planned under Karnataka Biotechnology Policy (2017 - 2022) and other activities undertaken by KITS in promoting the growth of the Biotech sector in the State.
