Founders

Gateway Speciality Chemicals Ltd was founded by two chemists, Dr Philip Huxley and Dr Richard Todd. Between them, Philip and Richard have over 45 years experience working in pharma and biotech companies in the UK, Switzerland and Belgium.

Richard has over 25 years experience in the pharmaceutical industry. He began his career as a medicinal chemist at Wyeth, then moved to British Biotech, latterly as a project leader on an anti-infective drug discovery program. In the recent past Richard has worked as a Principal Medicinal Research Fellow at Argenta Discovery, where he was a project leader for an in-house discovery program and a collaborative program with a US pharma. He then held the position of Head of Process Chemistry at Vernalis, with responsibility for drug development and CMC (including the management of outsourced manufacturing activities) for pre-clinical through to Phase II studies. In 2008 Richard established CMOpharma Ltd (http://www.cmopharma.co.uk), a chemistry consultancy providing drug discovery and development services to biotech, virtual biotech and small Pharma companies. Richard has published over 40 scientific papers and patents.

Philip has 20 years experience in the pharmaceutical industry and has played a key role in the identification of four clinical candidates. He began his career as a computational chemist with Novartis (Basel) and has subsequently held positions of increasing seniority with British Biotech (Head of Molecular Design), Avidex (Head of Drug Discovery), and Galapagos Genomics (Senior Director, Drug Discovery). Philip has a successful track record managing multidisciplinary teams combining resource from different disciplines and companies. At Galapagos Philip established the collaboration between Galapagos and Biofocus, which culminated in the merger of the two companies to form a combined group offering integrated Target and Drug Discovery services. Philip has published over 30 scientific articles and patents.