Chas bountra biography of donald
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Top ten innovators in pharma: Professor Chas Bountra
Rebecca Aris
pharmaphorum
(Continued from "Top ten innovators in pharma: Faisal Ahmed")
We asked you to nominate those who you considered to be a top innovator in pharma. We were delighted with your responses and have whittled it down to the top ten pharma innovators for this series.
This week we speak with Professor Chas Bountra who was nominated for his remarkable track record in drug discovery. He was recognised for his work generating freely available novel reagents to academic and industry collaborators to accelerate the identification of new targets for drug discovery.
Name: Chas Bountra
Position: ledare Scientist (SGC), Professor of Translational medicin, Dept of Clinical medicin, University of Oxford.
Reasons for nomination as a pharma innovator include:
• Chas runs the SGC in Oxford. The SGC is a public-private partnership between GSK, Pfizer, Novartis, Lilly, Abbott, Taked
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The glass half full man: Professor Chas Bountra and Oxford's innovative future
‘Everyone across the university has been inspired by the vaccine team,’ insists Professor Bountra. ‘They have seen what is feasible...[the creation of the vaccine and the work with Astra Zeneca] must be one of the biggest knowledge transfers in history.’
I’m so proud of what the vaccine team achieved...people wanted hope, they were desperate for hope and our colleagues gave them hope, and eventually a route out of this wretched pandemic
Professor Bountra
Professor Bountra is fizzing with undisguised enthusiasm, as he discusses everything from a dementia cure [do not count on it], to the COVID-19 vaccine [just fantastic] to the faculty [incredible] and the students [astonishing]. He really does not want to talk about himself – although this is supposed to be an interview about him. The self-effacing professor wants to talk only about Oxford and the future – ‘far more interesting’.
He maintai
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There are gasps of indignation when academics hear that pharmaceutical industry doesn’t trust academic research all that much. We think of the big pharma people as the bad guys, the conscience-free predators that prioritise profit over our health and wellbeing. Academics, on the other hand, care about the truth. They don’t aim to get rich, they aim to bring knowledge to the world.
That is, at least, what we would like to believe. However, the pharmaceutical industry believes that most academic research is not reproducible – how should we respond? This was the title of Chas Bountra’s talk, where he led us deep into the workings of both pharma and academic clinical research, and told us about his own way of finding a fruitful collaboration between the two.
The challenge of pharmaceutical research is finding novel, effective, affordable medicines – and discovering them quickly. In practice, discovering new medicines is incredibly difficult.
For example, a study recently looked i