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About

Every rare disease patient deserves a treatment

Patient-inspired

It all started when Dr Tim Guilliams and Dr David Brown met a man named Nick Sireau in 2014.

Nick had set up a patient group to help find treatments for an extremely rare genetic disorder that affected his sons. For a decade he worked tirelessly, but the drug discovery process was slow and very expensive - a challenge facing nearly all patient groups today.

Tim and Dave had long been advocating drug redevelopment - the use of existing drugs for new therapeutic purposes - when used in combination with artificial intelligence. They knew that this inexpensive and accelerated approach could help others like Nick and the rare disease community overcome the challenges they were facing and find treatments faster.

Nick became their inspiration – he was the living story of the therapeutic need their approach could meet.

Our values

Care for rare

Rare disease patients are at the heart of everything we do.

We seek opportunities to meaningfully support them and their families - from developing treatments, to volunteering with patient groups, to championing and engaging with the broader community.

Grow as
individuals

We are learners, always looking to extend and enhance our expertise.

We believe every voice matters, and work in an environment of mutual respect, honest opinions and trust for one another.

Win as
a team

We are united in our mission to help patients.

We strive to maintain an inclusive, diverse and caring culture where we can celebrate successes and lessons together.

Innovate
and deliver

The road ahead is challenging.

It requires rapid innovation and calculated risks that won’t compromise our high standards. We take action fast and learn from any failure along the way.

Our approach

At the centre of our approach our next-generation AI platform we built to find novel connections between drugs and diseases. We combine these predictions with in-house expertise to accelerate new treatments through our pipeline to clinical trials and on to patients.

 

Some of our board members, investors and partners

Latest news and articles

Our team

Dr Tim Guilliams

Dr Tim Guilliams

Co-founder and CEO

Tim is a tech entrepreneur from the Cambridge Cluster, passionate about using big data and AI to accelerate treatments for rare diseases. He is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive of Healx, the AI-powered, patient-inspired tech company, accelerating the discovery and development of rare disease treatments at scale. In 2019, Healx raised $56 million in Series B funding and was listed in Tech Nation’s Future Fifty cohort. In 2020, the company won 5 prizes at the CogX Awards including Grand Jury Prize and Best AI Product and was listed in CB Insights Digital Health 150.

As CEO of Healx, Tim has been listed in The Sunday Times Maserati 100 list of entrepreneurs in 2019, was was named as ‘One to watch’ in The Telegraph’s Top 50 Most Ambitious Business Leaders in 2020, and was selected as member of the Forbes Technology Council in 2022.

Tim is also the Co-Founder and Trustee of the Cambridge Rare Disease Network (CRDN). Prior to Healx and CRDN, he obtained his PhD at the University of Cambridge in the field of Biophysics and Neuroscience, developing nanobody technology for Parkinson's disease. Before moving to Cambridge UK, Tim obtained an MEng in Bio- and Chemical-Engineering from the University of Brussels.

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Dr Bruce Bloom

Dr Bruce Bloom

Chief Collaboration Officer

Dr Bruce Bloom is the founder and former CEO of Cures Within Reach, a leading global non-profit saving lives by unleashing the untapped potential of human approved drugs, devices, diagnostics and nutraceuticals, testing new uses for them to quickly deliver safe and affordable treatments and cures for diseases that have no currently effective therapy.

Bruce envisioned and created CureAccelerator®, the first online redevelopment research collaboration platform, to bring together clinicians, researchers, funders, and industry to create and conduct proof of concept redevelopment clinical trials. Dr Bloom is an Ashoka Social Entrepreneur Fellow, the Patient Advisory Board Chair for the Institute for Translational Medicine, board member of the Drug Discovery Center and Chair of the Cancer Center Advancement Advisory Boards at the University of Illinois Chicago, member of the Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research External Advisory Board, and is on the Science Advisory Boards of Rediscovery Life Sciences, the Dr. Ralph and Marian Falk Medical Research Trust Awards Programs, the Findacure Fundamental Disease Charity, the Rare Disease Research Hub of the Westchester Biotech Project, OneThree Biotech, and Cures Within Reach for Cancer, and is a member of the editorial board of ASSAY and Drug Development Technologies.

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Dr Mark Youssef

Dr Mark Youssef

Global Head of Business Development and Licensing

Mark is an experienced business development leader. As the Global Head of Business Development and Licensing, he is responsible for leading Healx's strategic and business development initiatives.

Prior to joining Healx, Mark was the Global Head of Business Development at Acrotech Biopharma where he successfully closed multiple transactions to help build the company from the start. Previously, he has also worked in Business Development at Bayer and held various positions in the pharmaceutical industry.

Mark has a Doctor of Pharmacy degree, Masters in Business Administration and post-doctoral fellowship training from Rutgers University.

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Nick Street

Nick Street

Head of Operations, People & Tech

Nick is a seasoned tech leader known for his expertise in building and leading highly effective and collaborative cross-disciplinary teams. Nick is responsible for the smooth daily operations of Healx, alongside leading People and Technology.

Nick has developed software products across a diverse range of industries and companies, including startups, enterprise organisations and consultancy firms. Prior to joining Healx, Nick played a key role in establishing Pivotal Labs in the UK, running the North EMEA business and leading the consulting team across Europe. At Labs Nick helped companies across many sectors to transform their software approach by applying lean agile, user centric and modern cloud methodologies.

Nick holds a Masters in Computer Science with Artificial Intelligence from Imperial College London.

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Richard Davenport

Richard Davenport

Senior Director, Drug Discovery

Over the last 25 years, Richard has progressed multiple preclinical candidates and led drug discovery projects in areas of inflammatory, metabolic, CNS and rare disease.

Richard's drug discovery career began at Chiroscience, one of the UK’s first biotech companies, where he took on increasing levels of seniority as the company grew, merging with Celltech and then UCB. Following this, Richard helped build out UK based NCE (New Chemical Entity) drug discovery capabilities for Takeda. He then joined C4X Discovery, applying the company's innovative 4D molecule visualiser NMR technology to design novel NCE’s.

Richard has a strong interest in applying automation and novel technologies which shorten and improve the probability of drug discovery projects successfully reaching the clinic. At Healx he is responsible for preclinical drug discovery activities.

Richard is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a Trustee of the Society of Medicines Research and has authored over 45 publications and patents.

Richard received his doctorate in Chemistry from Manchester University and undertook post doctoral studies at Arizona State University.

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Miguel Pignatelli

Miguel Pignatelli

Director, Tech Strategy

Miguel has over 20 years of experience in genomics, health science and biomedical research, leading the development of new methods for functional annotation of genomes and metagenomes in health and disease. For the last 10 years he has applied his expertise to the development of technological platforms to enable early drug discovery. He led the early development of the OpenTargets platform, an innovative, large-scale, public-private partnership that uses human genetics and genomics data for systematic drug target identification and prioritisation.

Miguel joined Healx in 2018, and led the development of key parts of our drug discovery technological pipeline, and is now establishing our tech strategy, roadmap and working to ensure alignment between scientific and technological teams.

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Simone Manso

Simone Manso

Head of Neurofibromatosis Therapy Development
Simone is passionate and committed to advance treatments for Neurofibromatosis (NF); he is personally connected with the condition and the NF community. As the Head of Neurofibromatosis Therapy Development, he is responsible for leading Healx's NF programme.

Simone also serves the NF community as a member of the Board of Directors of the Children’s Tumor Foundation, the leading not for profit organisation with the mission to end NF through research.

Prior to joining Healx, he held various senior HR positions in the financial and biotech sectors in Ireland and Switzerland. He is a psychologist by education and he has an Executive M.B.S. in Human Resource Strategies from DCU College in Dublin.
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Hanna Orr

Hanna Orr

Medical Director
Hanna is committed to advance treatments for Neurofibromatosis (NF) and rare disease with high unmet need which have been a focus of much of her clinical development career.

Prior to joining Healx, Hanna has worked as a clinical development physician for ~15 years at all stages of clinical development. She has supported both pivotal trials of several first-in-class products, which changed standard of care, and many Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving rare diseases. Hanna's career over the last 8 years has centered on oncology clinical development where she led and supported development of immune-oncology products, antiangiogenics, targeted agents and toxin conjugates in various solid tumour indications. Hanna has direct clinical experience working with hereditary neurodegenerative rare diseases and serving as investigator in clinical trials.
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Dr David Brown

Dr David Brown

Co-Founder and Chairman

David has over 40 years’ experience in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, covering both research and senior executive roles. During his career, he has served with four of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies: AstraZeneca, Pfizer, GlaxoWellcome, and Hoffman La-Roche. 

Whilst at Pfizer he was named co-inventor on the patent for Viagra, and for 8 years he led the team that invented and developed Viagra through to proof of clinical efficacy in male impotence. The drug is also marketed for treatment of pulmonary hypertension under the trade name Revatio. He also had a pivotal role in the discovery of Relpax, a treatment for migraine. Together these drugs have achieved sales of over $40 billion. 

While at Roche in Switzerland, he was a Director of the company and, as Global Head of Drug Discovery, he had responsibility for productivity of over 2000 scientists at Roche’s five research sites in the USA, Europe and Asia.

David subsequently co-founded antibody company Crescendo Biologics and serves on the boards of Healx (Chair), ProFactor Pharma Ltd (Chair) and Babraham Institute Enterprise Ltd (Chair). He is a Trustee (Director) of Friends of Manjushree Vidyapith School and Orphanage (FMVSO), a charity he co-founded in 2005 to help destitute orphans in South Tibet. 

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Chiara Sommer

Chiara Sommer

Board observer

Chiara Sommer is an Investment Director for Intel Capital EMEA located in Munich. She joined Intel Capital in 2018.

Chiara currently serves as a board observer on the boards of Volocopter, Caresyntax and Healx.

Prior to joining Intel Capital, Chiara worked at High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), Germany’s leading seed stage venture capital fund where she managed and completed more than 25 financing rounds (Seed, Series A & B) with leading German and international co-investors.  She is an entrepreneur at heart and founded an online advice startup in 2011 and prior to this, she worked in Investment Banking at J.P. Morgan and Management Consulting at goetzpartners.

She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Studies majoring in Finance from Cass Business School in London, where she took an ERASMUS year abroad at Bocconi University in Milan.

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Shaun Grady

Shaun Grady

Board member

Shaun Grady has responsibility for Global Business Development at AstraZeneca, leading the company’s transaction execution, due diligence and Alliance and Integration Management function including externalisation, licensing and partnering, M&A, and divestments. Shaun was appointed to his current role in 2013 with the creation of the Global Product and Portfolio Strategy (GPPS) unit. Prior to this, he was Vice President, Strategic Partnering & Business Development (2010-13) and Vice President, Corporate Business Development (2006-10).

Shaun originally joined ICI as an attorney and held positions in the pharmaceuticals, petrochemicals, and legal departments. Following the demerger from ICI, he was appointed Assistant General Counsel, Corporate for Zeneca. Shaun worked on the merger of Astra and Zeneca, the merger of Zeneca Agrochemicals with Novartis Agribusiness to form Syngenta, and the creation of Avecia. Shaun also worked on the acquisition of Cambridge Antibody Technology (CAT), led the acquisition of Amylin, and subsequent buy-out of Bristol-Myers’ Squibb’s interest in the AZ-BMS Diabetes Alliance. In addition, he has spent time in the US business managing the legal function and also completed a two year secondment to HR, leading a global People Strategy change project.

Shaun is an Honorary Fellow in Entrepreneurship at Cambridge Judge Business School and is a member of the Board of Cambridge United Football Club and Cambridge Arts Theatre.

Based in Cambridge, Shaun enjoys rugby and football, and occasionally turns his hand to sports writing.

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Jonathan Milner

Jonathan Milner

Board member

Jonathan, Co-Founder and current Deputy Chairman of Abcam plc, is an entrepreneur and investor who is passionate about supporting UK life science and high-tech start-ups. He has provided considerable investment and support to over 40 companies and has assisted three technology companies to IPO on the London AIM Stock Exchange.

Jonathan gained his doctorate in Molecular Genetics at Leicester University after graduating in Applied Biology at Bath. From 1992-95, he was a post-doctoral researcher at Bath, following which he worked at the University of Cambridge in the lab of Professor Tony Kouzarides researching the molecular basis of breast cancer. He identified the market opportunity for supplying high-quality antibodies to support protein interaction studies, and in 1998, founded Abcam with David Cleevely and Professor Tony Kouzarides.

Jonathan is also a non-executive director of Healx, Shift Bioscience and Syndicate Room. He is also Chairman of Axol Bioscience, Cambridge Allergy, PhoreMost.

In 2015 Jonathan, with Professor Tony Kouzarides, co-founded the Milner Therapeutics Institute at the University of Cambridge. Also in 2015 he co-founded, with Professor Laurence Hurst, the Milner Centre for Evolutionary Studies at the University of Bath.

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Suranga Chandratillake

Suranga Chandratillake

Board member

Suranga joined Balderton as a General Partner in 2014. He was previously an entrepreneur and engineer. Suranga founded blinkx, the intelligent search engine for video and audio content in Cambridge in 2004. He then led the company for eight years as CEO through its journey of moving to San Francisco, building a profitable business and going public in London where it achieved a peak market capitalisation in excess of $1Bn. Before founding blinkx, Suranga was an early employee at Autonomy Corporation - joining as an engineer in the Cambridge R&D team and ultimately serving as the company's US CTO in San Francisco.

Suranga has a MA in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge. He holds patents in the area of video discovery and online video advertising, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2012 and was chosen as one of the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders in 2009. In 2017, Suranga joined the UK Government's Council for Science and Technology. Suranga was granted an OBE for services to technology and engineering in the 2018 UK New Year's Honours.

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Irina Haivas

Irina Haivas

Board member

Irina Haivas is a Partner at Atomico. She is passionate about machine intelligence-enabled businesses, next generation biology, robotics and automation, and other frontier technologies. She also focuses on companies in healthcare. Before joining Atomico, Irina was a growth and PE investor at healthcare-focused fund GHO Capital, and a strategy consultant at Bain & Co. where she worked with over 30 companies across Europe and the US. Irina trained as a doctor, and was a surgical fellow at Harvard Medical School before completing an MSc (Dist) in International Health Policy at the London School of Economics.

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Ronjon Nag

Ronjon Nag

Board Member

Ronjon Nag has been building AI systems for 40 years and sold companies he co-founded or advised to Motorola, RIM/Blackberry and Apple. He became a Stanford Interdisciplinary Distinguished Careers Institute Fellow in 2016, and teaches Longevity Science, AI, Genes and Ethics in the Stanford School of Medicine. He received a PhD from Cambridge, an MS from MIT, the IET Mountbatten Medal, the $1 million Verizon Powerful Answers Award, and the 2021 IEEE-SCV Outstanding Engineer Award. He is a cofounder and part owner of some 100 AI and biotech startups.

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Dr Neil Thompson

Dr Neil Thompson

Chair of Healx Scientific Advisory Board
Dr Mike Tranfaglia

Dr Mike Tranfaglia

Medical Director and Chief Scientific Officer, FRAXA Research Foundation
Professor Tim Cox

Professor Tim Cox

Physician, Addenbrooke’s Hospital Director MB/PhD Programme
Dr Darrin Disley OBE

Dr Darrin Disley OBE

CEO and Investor, Mogrify, former CEO of Horizon Discovery
Hanadi Jabado

Hanadi Jabado

Director of Enterprise at Cambridge Judge Business School, Pitch@Palace
Dr Andreas Bender

Dr Andreas Bender

Reader for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge University
Dr Nick Sireau

Dr Nick Sireau

Chairman of AKU and founder of Findacure
Elia Stupka

Elia Stupka

SVP and General Manager - Life Sciences Business at Health Catalyst

Awards

Best Use of AI in Health and Medicine 2019
Best Use of AI in Health and Medicine 2019
AI Company of the Year 2019
AI Company of the Year 2019
Future Fifty 8.0 Cohort
Future Fifty 8.0 Cohort
Company Award for Innovation 2020
Company Award for Innovation 2020
Outstanding Achievement in Social Good Use of AI 2020
Outstanding Achievement in Social Good Use of AI 2020
Outstanding AI Accelerator 2020
Outstanding AI Accelerator 2020
Best AI Product in Health 2020
Best AI Product in Health 2020
CB Insights Digital Health 150 2020
CB Insights Digital Health 150 2020
East of England Tech 50
East of England Tech 50
Top 50 Companies to Work for 2021
Top 50 Companies to Work for 2021
Top Biotech R&D Tech Startups 2020
Top Biotech R&D Tech Startups 2020
Tech for Good Award 2021
Tech for Good Award 2021
Top Life Sciences Platform Startups 2021
Top Life Sciences Platform Startups 2021
Outstanding Achievement in Social Good use of AI 2021
Outstanding Achievement in Social Good use of AI 2021
Tech4Good Awards: AI for Good winner
Tech4Good Awards: AI for Good winner
London Tech Week: Tech for Impact Startup of the Year (Shortlisted)
London Tech Week: Tech for Impact Startup of the Year (Shortlisted)
Eurordis Black Pearl Award
Eurordis Black Pearl Award

Be a part of the future of drug discovery

We are always keen to hear from companies who share our vision for AI to be placed at the core of drug discovery and development.