Dr. Darrin M Disley

Chief Executive Officer

Dr Darrin M Disley is the CEO of Horizon Discovery Ltd. and is responsible for corporate development, business strategy and investor relations.

Darrin is a parallel business entrepreneur and has been involved in the start-up and growth of ten high-tech business ventures. He is an experienced general manager with a track-record for raising investment for and managing the growth of early-stage technology companies.

Darrin holds a PhD in Biotechnology from the University of Cambridge; has been the author of six papers, 7 patent applications and 32 conference abstracts and; has been an advisor on biotech commercialisation strategies to key technology centres in Europe, USA, India and Africa.

Dr. Chris Torrance

Chief Scientific Officer

Dr. Chris Torrance has significant oncology research and development experience, including six years as a senior manager at Cambridge-based pharmaceutical company, Vernalis. His principle expertise lies is cancer cell biology and drug discovery. In this field, he has led project teams taking drug targets from inception through to hit identification, lead optimisation and into preclinical studies.

Chris is the co-inventor on a patent describing the use of “isogenic” X-MAN™ cell-lines to directly screen for agents that affect specific cancer pathways. As a result of this work, he has developed considerable expertise in the generation of X-MAN™ cell-lines and their application to drug discovery.

Chris is a co-author on nine, high-impact, peer-reviewed papers in the field of oncology and cancer drug discovery. Chris holds a PhD from East Carolina University, U.S.A. and completed a Post-Doctoral position in the world renowned oncology lab of Professor Bert Vogelstein (Johns Hopkins University) where he pioneered the use of X-MAN™ cancer models in high-throughput screening and drug discovery.

Chris is the principle founder of Horizon Discovery Ltd.

Dr. Paul Morrill

Commercial Director

Paul was Commercial Director of Acumen Bioscience Limited (ABL). He had previously held positions of Director of Marketing at ABL and Business Development Manager at The Technology Partnership.

Over the past 18 years, Paul has developed a strong track record in business and commercial development including the closing of multi-million pound capital equipment & reagent deals with premier pharmaceutical and diagnostic industry players. He holds a PhD in Biotechnology from the University of Cambridge.

Mr. Dan Cowell

Chief Operations Officer

Dan Cowell has over 15 years research and management experience in the contract research and biotechnology industry. In his roles at Oxford Diversity, Cambridge Combinatorial, Cambridge Material Science and Millennium Pharmaceuticals he was involved in 'hit to lead' discovery and the investigation of new technologies in the areas of automation, high-throughput catalysis, pharmaceutical solid form and lead generation.

In 2003 Dan co-founded Pharmorphix, a specialist CRO in the area of solid form, which grew market share rapidly and was subsequently acquired by Sigma Aldrich in 2006. Following the sale of Pharmorphix he founded Hypoxium, based on the principle of a client focused CRO. Hypoxium grew its revenues at over 75% a year and established itself as a trusted provider of pre-clinical oncology research.

Following the acquisition of Hypoxium by Horizon Discovery in 2010, Dan was appointed as Chief Operating Officer of Horizon Discovery Ltd.

Mr. Eric Rhodes

Chief Technology Officer

Eric joined Horizon at the start of 2012 and brings to us a background that includes over 15 years of gene regulation and gene editing experience. Prior to joining Horizon, Eric served as Director of Business Development at Sigma-Aldrich Corp. where he helped Sigma in launching its nuclease based gene editing platform.

Eric served for 10 years as Vice-President of Business Development and Alliance Management at Sangamo BioSciences where he was responsible for putting target validation and technology licensing deals in place with over 25 of the top pharma and biotech companies in North America, Europe, and Asia.

Eric has broad experience in growing small companies having participated in the successful launch of several start-ups in the San Francisco Bay Area. Eric has extensive molecular biology bench experience and earned his degree in Microbiology and Immunology from UC Berkeley.

Mr. Peter Keen

Chief Financial Officer

Peter is a chartered accountant with more than 26 years’ experience in the financing and management of biotechnology companies. Peter has a notable track record in the UK biotechnology sector and until March 2010 was corporate development and finance director of the private biotechnology company Serentis Ltd. He was co-founder and finance director of Chiroscience Group plc after which he helped establish the venture capital firm Merlin Biosciences Limited, where he was responsible for a number of early stage investments including Arakis Ltd, Ark Therapeutics Group plc, Cyclacel, ReNeuron plc and Vectura Group plc. On leaving Merlin he became chief financial officer of Arakis Limited, leading a £29m fund raising and then a successful trade sale in 2005; he then became a partner with the technology venture firm DFJ Esprit LLP before joining ex colleagues at Serentis.

Peter has sat on numerous company and advisory Boards and is currently chairman at Oval Medical Technologies Ltd and Exosect Ltd, the senior independent director at Abcam plc and a non-executive director of Ark Therapeutics Group plc and the Biotech Growth Trust plc.

Dr. Karin Schmitt

R&D Director

Dr. Karin Schmitt joined Horizon Discovery in 2012 as R&D Director. She has over fifteen years of experience in research, management and business within the life sciences. Karin has worked in the biotech field including Millennium Pharmaceuticals and Exelixis Inc. and in the life science sector with Open Biosystems and ThermoFisher Scientific. Her expertise spans genomics, functional genomics and proteomics, and their applications in drug discovery as well as basic research.

Karin obtained her Ph.D. in Molecular Biology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and completed her postdoctoral training as an EMBO fellow in the Genetics Department at Cambridge University.

Mr. Kam Dhaliwal

Director of Business Development

As a member of the Horizon Discovery commercial team, Kam brings us a wealth of commercial experience and a proven track record of success in business generation in areas of high value contract services and research & technology solutions for discovery research.

He joins us from Evotec AG, where he was a senior member of the business development team and responsible for selling integrated drug discovery services throughout Europe. Prior to joining Evotec, he was Head of European Commercial Development for Acumen Bioscience Ltd (a subsidiary of The Technology Partnership) and a part of the management team that successfully positioned and established the Acumen brand within the competitive high-throughput screening market. After completing postgraduate studies at University of Kent, Kam joined Quadrant Healthcare Ltd in 1993 and helped establish a strong IP-position around the company's proprietary stabilisation technology platform.