Domainex prepares for expansion as it announces appointment of Barry Knight as CFO & Thomas Mander as COO

Cambridge, UK, 8th April 2015 / Sciad Newswire / Barry Knight is a Chartered Accountant and brings extensive financial expertise to Domainex, having been an executive director for Life Sciences companies for more than 25 years. Barry was previously Finance Director of both Trigen Holdings plc and AIM-listed Fulcrum Pharma plc. Most recently he was COO at Kinapse Limited during a period of rapid growth and its partial sale to a VC investor. In addition to his role at Fulcrum Pharma, he has been involved in preparing two further companies for listing, and has considerable experience in securing private equity funding and driving mergers, acquisitions and divestments.

Tom Mander started his career as a senior scientist with Xenova plc before becoming a group leader managing high-throughput screening at Glaxo Wellcome. Tom has been involved in the contract drug discovery and the translational research sector for the past 16 years. He held operational, business development, and marketing roles at Evotec AG before taking executive management positions at Tripos Discovery Research ltd (Vice President of Business Development) and Asterand Plc (Vice President of Sales and Marketing) prior to the companies’ trade sales. He joins Domainex from the Early Discovery division of Charles River, formerly BioFocus, where he was Director of Business Development. Tom will have specific responsibility for leading the Domainex service division.

Eddy Littler, CEO of Domainex said: “We are very happy to welcome Barry into Domainex. His financial expertise will help the further development of Domainex as a highly-productive and profitable business, and will be key as we seek to expand the business.

Our service business is performing very well, with new contracts from a number of biotech and pharma companies, as well as academic clients. We have built a firm platform that Tom will lead and expand”.

Domainex’s Chairman Keith Powell commented: “The appointment of Barry and Tom adds considerably to our executive team. Domainex has a superb reputation for conducting world-class science and driving its clients’ projects to the clinic. The addition of these two senior executives to our management team will help Domainex to progress its growth strategy over the coming years, and will keep Domainex at the forefront of drug discovery technology providers”.

Notes for Editor

About Domainex

Founded in 2002, Domainex is based in Cambridge, UK. It is one of the fastest growing UK biotechnology companies and a leading provider of drug discovery services to pharma, biotech and academia.

Domainex is a privately-owned revenue-generating company. It has attracted investment from UCLB, the Bloomsbury Bioseed Fund, Longbow Capital, The Capital Fund (managed by YFM Venture Finance), Bury-Fitzwilliam, Juno Capital, and from Takeda Research Investments. The UK’s Biomedical Catalyst, run jointly by the Technology Strategy Board and the Medical Research Council, has also supported Domainex’s work on COPD drug discovery.

Domainex is a drug discovery CRO with a reputation for speed and innovation, built on an exceptional track record of drug candidate delivery. It has a world-class discovery team with the unrivalled track record of an average of one candidate drug delivered every year in the past six on behalf of its clients. Domainex’s focus is on providing a highly efficient and well considered scientific solutions to enable successful drug discovery programmes against a wide range of drug targets.

Services offered by Domainex include medicinal chemistry, hit identification, assay development, cell biology and mode of action studies, DMPK testing and protein expression.

Domainex’s discovery platform enables rapid progression of drug discovery projects from novel target through to candidate drug by means of its Combinatorial Domain Hunting (CDH) technology, LeadBuilder virtual hit screening software, and its integrated approach to medicinal and computational chemistry.

Major discovery ‘gaps’ exist between the vast amount of genomic information that is now available, the accessibility of the corresponding proteins for use in target validation and drug discovery, and the identification of robust hits in a cost-effective manner. Domainex utilises its proprietary platform technologies in order to solve these challenges, which enables it to tackle exciting but challenging drug targets in order to deliver novel and potentially life-saving therapies for COPD and cancer.

For more information see: www.domainex.co.uk or contact:
Dr Joanne McCudden, Head of Business Development
Joanne.mccudden@domainex.co.uk, Tel +44 (0)7775 437107
Media Relations: Sylvie Berrebi
sylvie@sciad.com Tel +44 (0)7795 197271