Repositive, a Cambridge UK technology startup bidding to help accelerate cancer drug discovery, has hired three senior executives to ready the business for its next phase of growth.
Established in 2014 as a social enterprise, Repositive has grown its headcount by 50 per cent in the last 12 months and now numbers 38 people. The company has created a secure platform that helps increase discovery, access to and sharing of genomic research data for the benefit of patients.
Repositive has created two products based on its platform through which communities of researchers and data providers can connect and share previously hard to access data and models, to support research studies.
The three new senior hires are Ave Wrigley as chief technology officer; Robert Thong as chief business officer; and Julian Coe, chief finance and operating officer.
Wrigley, has over 20 years’ experience running technology departments across a wide variety of disciplines – including ecommerce and digital marketing, data-driven marketing insights and multimedia content management – and will help Repositive focus on scalable delivery and maximising the benefits of the platforms for researchers and data providers.
Robert Thong brings almost 30 years of experience in leadership and commercial roles in B2B enterprises in the life sciences sector. Thong is a recognised authority on the biopharma R & D externalisation trend, a published author on biopharma R & D partnerships and also a guest lecturer on R & D alliances at institutions including the University of Cambridge and University College London.
Julian Coe is an experienced finance director who has previously supported large health companies – such as LGC Genomics and Ieso Digital Health – with creating business plans, developing finance models and securing funding.
Coe said: “Repositive has incredible potential and I am determined to use my experience to help the company raise the funding it needs and to scale its operations to execute its growth plan.
“Precision medicine is the future but its development requires biomedical researchers to have immediate access to a much greater volume of more pertinent genomic data. Repositive is making waves in the research world by providing this advanced search capability.
“We now have an incredibly strong team and we are confident that, in the next six months, we will be the world’s single largest source of translational cancer models for researchers.”
Repositive’s first data-sharing product, Discover, was launched in 2016 to enable researchers globally to locate any human genomic data that is already publicly available but is often not, for a number of reasons, easily located or accessible.
Discover now indexes over one million datasets from more than 50 data sources, and is forming the basis of Repositive’s contribution to the NIH Data Commons initiative.
Responding to demand from biopharma and biotech companies, Repositive has also developed a second product based on its secure platform, which is poised to become the world’s largest marketplace and community for translational cancer models.
Repositive’s Cancer Models provides commercial oncology researchers with a holistic, searchable, comparable view of existing cancer models across the globe, whilst providing Contract Research Organisations – providers of cancer models – with a tool to market, showcase and manage their model inventory.
• PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: Julian Coe
