34-35 - Your moves

Envision is pleased to announce the appointment of Meg Heim as its new Chief Executive Officer. Meg is an accomplished business leader with strong leadership experience, and an established reputation within pharmaceutical, medical device and health technology markets.

Throughout her career she has championed the professionalism of medical affairs and the innovations that improve patient experience.

Working closely with a strong and experienced executive leadership team, Meg will be responsible for delivering an ambitious five-year plan that will reinforce Envision as a global leader in scientific and commercialisation strategy and solutions, medical affairs, and life cycle planning enabled by leading technology solutions and world-class people.

Meg joins Envision at a pivotal moment, with Group performance accelerating as it continues to deliver a compelling combination of technology and services to clients.

ValiRx – a company focused on early-stage cancer therapeutics and women's health – has bolstered its drug discovery and therapeutic expertise with the appointment of Dr Cathy Tralau-Stewart as its interim Chief Scientific Officer (CSO).

With more than 20 years’ senior academic and industry leadership experience, Cathy joins ValiRx from drug discovery company C4X Discovery, where she was CSO and managed the project portfolio and research and development strategy. Prior to this, she was Senior Director of Alliances for Takeda Pharmaceuticals where she was responsible strategic development and management of academic alliances for the US, Australia, Japan and Europe.

Cathy started her career at GSK in various roles, before moving into academia where she built drug discovery portfolios.

UPS has appointed Cathy O’Brien as UPS Healthcare’s Vice President for International Sales.

Based in Ireland, Cathy will be responsible for driving growth across Europe, AMEA and Latin America for the end-to-end supply chain service dedicated to supporting pharma, medical device, lab and dental segments. Cathy joined UPS in July 2016 as a Managing Director for UPS Healthcare’s European business and took on further responsibility for the ISMEA region in 2020.

UPS Healthcare is growing its global footprint and has recently announced plans to acquire the Bomi Group, which has temperature-controlled facilities in 14 countries across Europe and Latin America. The acquisition will add nearly 3,000 team members to UPS.

Matthew Skinner is Care City’s new Chief Executive Officer. Matthew will lead the company in its mission to secure a happier, healthier older age for East Londoners, through research, innovation and workforce development.

Other responsibilities will include securing future investments for the business, leading relationships with key partners and continuing to raise the profile of Care City through generating a positive image of the contribution the work makes to the community it serves.

As Care City takes possession of its long-term office in Barking next Spring, Matthew will also be responsible for making a success of this home, using it to bring benefit to the local community and as a platform to showcase Care City’s work and mission.

Matthew joins the team from TPXimpact where, as Managing Director, he oversaw the delivery of complex and innovative organisational change projects for public sector clients.

Myeloma UK, the national charity for the incurable blood cancer myeloma, has appointed Shelagh McKinlay as its new Director of Research & Advocacy.

The position is a new role for Myeloma UK, consolidating the full portfolio of the charity’s clinical and health services research alongside its policy, drug access and clinical practice focus.

Shelagh holds 25 years’ experience in high profile policy roles, with over eight years of experience specialising in policy and treatment access in blood cancer. Recently, she served on a task and finish group as part of the NICE Methods Review as well as taking up membership of a working group looking at NICE processes.

She also led the team that earlier this year produced the report, A Life Worth Living, which focused on the importance of quality-of-life outcomes to patients with the incurable blood cancer myeloma; benchmarks that the charity is currently pressing to be recognised in the English and Scottish cancer strategies.

Onyx has announced the appointment of Trevor Pill as its new Managing Director. He will be taking over the day-to-day running of the agency from owner and founder Karen Winterhalter, who originally set up the agency in 2003.

Trevor's key priority in his new role will be driving forward the agency's international growth plans and establishing a commercial presence in the United States. Onyx Health already has several major national and international clients in the pharmaceutical industry, including Bayer, Clinigen, Nova Laboratories and Foot Science International.

Trevor plans to expand Onyx Health's existing service offer by developing omnichannel campaigns to establish it as a leading independent healthcare agency.

Cherwell Laboratories, supplier of environmental monitoring and process validation solutions for the pharmaceutical industry, has expanded its cleanroom microbiology sales specialist team to create additional support for customers in the north of the UK. Eleanor Corbett has been appointed as Cherwell’s Business Development Manager across the north.

An experienced microbiologist with over 25 years of laboratory practice, Eleanor is well placed to work closely with Cherwell’s customers to fully understand and help them meet their specific environmental monitoring and validation needs.

Her microbiology experience is extensive, transitioning from technician to lab management, plus quality and site management roles, predominantly in the food and water industries. More recently Eleanor has evolved to business development in the life sciences sector.

Pharma digital consultancy, Kanga Health has created two new leadership roles within its management team. The roles will help the agency support a string of new clients.

Audrey Gent, Client Services Director, will be responsible for leading the 25+ team of digital strategists, and the development of strategic services across the agency. She will ensure that Kanga processes – internally dubbed the ‘Kanga Way’ – is echoed in all that the agency does for its clients and the healthcare and pharma industry.

She is also the senior point of contact for the day-to-day management of key clients, to integrate new ideas, strategies, and solutions; leads client programs; and projects from a strategic business perspective.

Helen Harrison, Client Strategy Director, is Kanga's senior authority on the agency’s strategic customer and patient-centric approach. Helen is responsible for ensuring internal strategic methodologies are current, effective and tailored appropriately to each client’s individual needs, and are being implemented accordingly. As well as providing strategic direction to Kanga’s client-facing business and to client projects.

Helen and Audrey bring immense pharma and consumer experience, spanning over 23 years. This includes senior roles at AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Veeva and Eli Lilly, alongside a decade of combined years at Kanga Health.

Optibrium – a developer of software and artificial intelligence solutions for drug discovery – has announced three appointments: Michelle Harrison as Head of Strategic Marketing, Chris Khoury as Associate Director of Business Development and Imran Ghauri as Business Development Manager.

The appointments bring extensive AI and life sciences expertise and will align global business development and marketing strategies to further develop and commercialise the company’s computer-aided drug discovery technologies.

Michelle joins Optibrium as Head of Strategic Marketing with eight years’ marketing experience, delivering high-impact strategy and effective marketing campaigns for scale-ups in the drug discovery and digital health space to successfully target global pharma, biotech, academic and investor audiences. Michelle was previously Senior Marketing Manager at Healx, where she gained significant expertise in the AI drug discovery space, as well as cultivating the brand.

Osivax, a company developing vaccines to provide broad-spectrum protection against highly mutating infectious viruses and diseases, has announced the expansion of its leadership team with the appointment of Dr Vincent Bille as Chief Manufacturing Officer.

His years of experience and in-depth knowledge of Chemistry, Manufacturing and Control (CMC) will be instrumental for the scale-up of the manufacturing process for its lead programme, OVX836, a broad-spectrum influenza vaccine candidate currently in phase 2 clinical evaluation.

Vincent has already contributed to Osivax’ manufacturing strategy through the certification of his quality control lab, located at the heart of the Liège Science Park, that will enable the release of OVX836 batches for use in clinical trials.

Before joining Osivax, Vincent spent 15 years as an independent consultant for biotech and pharmaceutical companies.

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