Tim is a social entrepreneur passionate about delivering the next generation of therapeutics to rare disease patients in need. He is the Founder and Chief Executive of Healx and the Co-Founder and Chair of the Cambridge Rare Disease Network (CRDN), a charity aiming to foster dialogue and awareness around rare diseases in Cambridge, UK.

Prior to Healx and CRDN, Tim worked on University-Industry interactions and cluster dynamics in the area of Life Sciences for the UK Government Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). He obtained his PhD in the field of Biophysical Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, where his research related to the development of antibody fragments as novel biophysical and therapeutic tools for Parkinson’s disease. As a PhD student, Tim co-founded multiple successful student societies, including the Cambridge University Science and Policy Exchange (CUSPE), and was involved with Innovation Forum, Oxbridge Biotech Roundtable (OBR) and the Cambridge University Technology and Enterprise Club (CUTEC). He is also a Junior Associate Fellow of the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP). Before moving to Cambridge, he obtained an MEng & BEng in Bio-Engineering from the University of Brussels (VUB).

David Cavalla has 30 years experience in various senior scientific and commercial roles within the pharmaceutical industry, and 15 years in drug repurposing; previously he was founder and CEO of Arachnova Ltd, and prior to that, at Glaxo Group Research Ltd and Napp Research Centre. He is also founder and principal of Numedicus Limited.

He is author of Off-Label Prescribing: Justifying Unapproved Medicine, and one of the first advocates of drug repurposing, using this strategy to create three first-in-class developmental products to have successfully passed human proof of concept clinical stages. He obtained a first degree and PhD at Cambridge University and spent two years as a visiting Fellow at the NIMH, Washington, DC. He is author/inventor of over 70 published papers and patents.

Andreas Bender is a Lecturer for Molecular Informatics with the Centre for Molecular Informatics at the University of Cambridge. Until April 2010 he was an Assistant Professor for Cheminformatics and Pharmaceutical IT with the Leiden / Amsterdam Center for Drug Research and Head of the Pharma-IT Platform at Leiden University. In his work, he is involved with the analysis of various kinds of bioactivity data and the generation of property prediction models, mainly for small molecules.

Narissa has and background in marketing and fundraising and over the last 12 years has been working working with a number of medical research charities. Her role at Healx is to ensure the patient is at the centre of every activity.

Richard has over 15 years experience building databases and websites for biology research in both academia and industry. In the Genetics Department at Cambridge University he led development of InterMine, an open source biological data warehousing platform. InterMine went on to be used at several major academic sites and projects around the world.

Richard also founded Nowomics, a website to help life scientists track the latest papers relevant to their research by following genes, diseases and other keywords to create a personalised Twitter-like news feed.

As senior investigator at the MRC Cancer Cell Unit, Cambridge, Ian lead the development of molecular cytogenetic and genomics approaches for the discovery of disease genes in small round blue cell tumours, and cervical carcinoma. During this time Ian developed algorithms for copy number imbalance analysis and integration with expression data using array based techniques.

Following a move to industry, as Head of Informatics at Population Genetics Technologies Ltd Ian lead the development of Next Generation DNA Sequencing (NGS) variant discovery pipelines. Ian continued to develop NGS based variant discovery workflows as Senior Bioinformatician at 14M Genomics, before joining Healx in 2016.