About

Management Team

PharmaLinks is managed on a day-to-day basis by its Director, Alan Harvey. He is assisted by an administrative team and by a Management Group of senior scientists and business development and marketing executives.

Professor Alan Harvey has a background in neuropharmacology and current interests in the use of natural products for drug discovery. He has published 10 books (written or edited) and 200 research papers. Along with phytochemistry colleagues, he has assembled a highly diverse collection of plant extracts for use in random screening. This has led to several patent applications and numerous leads that are being followed up in different therapeutic areas.

Since 1988, Professor Harvey has led the Strathclyde Institute for Drug Research, a collaborative centre in the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow which encourages interactions between academic researchers and industry. SIDR has attracted more than US$30 million in industrial funding. SIDR has been used as the model for PharmaLinks.

Anne Muir is the Business Development Manager for the Faculty of Science, at the University of Strathclyde and joined the management team of PharmaLinks in 2003. She brings a strong background of business development to the role having worked in sales and business development for a major pharmaceutical company for several years. As the Faculty Business Development Manager at the University of Strathclyde, she has responsibility for commercialisation of university IP, developing research collaborations, and raising external finance to support faculty strategic research initiatives. Through PharmaLinks, she is actively involved in promoting a portfolio of technologies to a commercial exit, via pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

Professor Billy Kerr has been a member of the academic staff at the University of Strathclyde since 1989 and a professor in Organic Chemistry within the Department of Pure and Applied Chemistry since 2002. Prior to joining Strathclyde, he has worked at the Imperial College London and at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA.

Billy’s research interests cover a broad range of synthetic organic methods, which have most notably been applied in the development of new total synthesis programmes. He has worked on many medicinally important molecules including anticancer, insecticidal and antibiotic agents. He has also developed a series of new metal catalysts that allow direct isotopic labelling of aromatic compounds, as well as having established a growing body of reagents for use in novel asymmetric synthetic processes.

Dr David McBeth is the Director of Research & Consultancy Services, the University of Strathclyde’s research contracts and commercialisation office. David has spent much of the last 10 years in the IPR commercialisation process, with particular reference to IPR management and licensing. Prior to his promotion in 2003, he spent four years as Deputy Director & IPR Manager with responsibility for all Strathclyde’s IPR management and licensing activity. He currently serves on the Steering Group and Management Group of PharmaLinks, and is a Director of Scottish BioMedical Research Trust Ltd. Ironically, despite his long involvement in life sciences licensing activity, his technical background is originally as an industrial inorganic chemist.

Prior to joining Strathclyde, Dr McBeth was employed for four years by Napier University, latterly as Director of Napier’s Research Office. While at Napier, David spent two years on secondment with the Royal Society of Edinburgh as Project Manager for the Society’s joint enquiry with Scottish Enterprise into Commercialisation of Scotland’s Science Base. The Commercialisation Enquiry ultimately spawned several Scottish successes that have subsequently been adopted elsewhere including Enterprise Fellowships and the Proof of Concept Fund. Prior to joining Napier, Dr McBeth spent eight years in ICI, starting off in new product development and latterly working as a Plant Manager at ICI’s Runcorn complex.

Professor Susan Pyne has been a member of Strathclyde University since 1990, during which time she held a prestigious Wellcome Trust Senior Basic Biomedical Fellowship for eight years, joining the academic staff in 2001. Her training is as a biochemist and she has over twenty years experience of research in signal transduction with her work being recognised internationally.

In particular, she specialises in signal transduction that involves the lipids sphingosine 1-phosphate, lysophosphatidic acid and phosphatidic acid. This includes the study of G protein-coupled receptors that are activated by these lipids as well as the enzymes that catalyse their synthesis and removal. Several of these receptors and enzymes are now key targets for drug discovery programmes worldwide and have enormous therapeutic potential in the areas of transplant rejection, cardiovascular diseases and cancer.