John
is Chief Scientific Officer at Oxford Nanopore. On the Executive
team, he has responsibility for all chemical and biological R&D
activity within the company and particularly the design and delivery of
the company’s nanopore-based sequencing technology. John drives the
primary architectural designs of the chemical systems, building a
disruptive system ready for launch into the marketplace.
John
joined Oxford Nanopore from Solexa (2001-2007), where as Senior
Director of R&D he designed and built the Reversible Terminator
chemistry that now drives the Illumina Genome Analyzer system. He
built and managed a large, multi-disciplinary scientific team in areas
including synthetic nucleotide chemistry, fluorescence chemistry,
photochemistry, enzyme engineering, sample prep and chip surface
chemistry. He also drove development of the full sequencing protocols
and ultimately the scale-up and production of the sequencing reagents
for commercial launch. The scientific work of John’s team was critical
to the achievement of early sequence data that progressed to other
major sequencing milestones and ultimately a full human genome. Solexa
was sold to Illumina for $650m in 2007 after the successful placement
of 12 instruments, and the Illumina Genome Analyzer is now considered
the market leader.
Earlier in his career, following his Ph.D
in Chemistry, John held various scientific and management positions in
Medicinal Chemistry firstly at GlaxoWellcome (6yrs) then at Xenova
(4yrs), where he specialized in designing new chemical systems that
interact with the biological machinery of genetic processing with
applications as antiviral and anti-cancer therapeutics.