Are you interested in having a greater impact on healthcare by translating your science into start-ups? Do you want to hear stories where scientists successfully take their research from bench to business? Are you interested in gene therapy and possible applications of disease-targeting engineered viruses in oncology? We are delighted to welcome professor Len Seymour to share with us his career path as an academic and entrepreneur.
Professor Leonard Seymour is Professor of Gene Therapies, Director of the Clinical Pharmacology Section within the Department of Oncology, and Head of the Cancer Research UK Medicinal Virology Group at the University of Oxford. He is a scientific founder and former Board member of Hybrid Biosystems Ltd which, in 2010, merged with Myotec Therapeutics Ltd to became PsiOxus Therapeutics, a biotechnology company that produces novel therapeutics particularly for cancer treatment and which is currently conducting a series of clinical trials exploring intravenous delivery of oncolytic viruses for treatment of advanced cancer. In 2012 he was a founding scientist of Oxford Genetics, a plasmid company developing a modular approach to molecular cloning in order to improve the efficiency of genetic engineering and synthetic biology. From 2018, he is a scientific founder and part time Chief Scientific Officer of MacrophOx, which is developing innovative gene-modified cellular therapies for cancer treatment.