Lu-Gang Yu is Professor of Glyco-oncology at the University of Liverpool. He has more than 30-year experience in studying the role of lectins, in particular galectins, in cancer development, progression and metastasis. He is an internationally recognized leader in the galectin field with over 100 publications in the area. His lab was the first to reveal a role and the underlying mechanisms of circulating galectins in promotion of circulating tumour cell metastatic spreading. Part of his research in recent years has been focused on translational development of novel galectin inhibitors from natural and synthetic sources for cancer treatment. 

Dr Karen Sullivan is a scientist and lawyer with over 20 years’ experience in technology commercialisation in the public and private sector. She has closed well over 100 technology transactions spanning all technology sectors and covering assignment, licences, options, Joint ventures and spin outs, and has served on national working groups on best practice in commercialisation of research. With extensive senior management experience, Karen has built a number of high performing teams and her transactional experience is well aligned to the Galytx business model.

Mrs Helen Delahaye has had various COO, Programme and Project Leadership positions, and formerly worked with both CRO and Pharma companies including; ProStrakan (including management of a research team at KPU, Japan), Quintiles, Pfizer (France & UK) and Huntingdon Life Sciences. As Managing Director of a Programme Management Consultancy (Deltohn Ltd) since 2002, Helen has been involved in numerous research and development programmes including oversight/programme management of several Phase 1/2a/2 clinical trials in oncology.

Dr David Cook has worked in the pharmaceutical industry for over 20 years, both in big pharma and biotech where he has gained very broad experience of both drug discovery and development, working on projects from target identification through to supporting marketed drugs. He worked for AstraZeneca for 17 years in a wide variety of roles both in the UK and the US and helped set up AstraZeneca’s systems biology group before moving into the safety of medicines functions developing new approaches to improve the understanding of the safety of new medicines. David was also heavily involved in the analysis of AstraZeneca’s drug portfolio which aimed to understand what makes a successful drug project and was the lead author on the resulting ‘5Rs’ paper which presented the outcomes of this analysis and how AstraZeneca used this analysis to developed a new framework to better understand and deliver quality in drug projects. David left AstraZeneca in 2015 to help set up Blueberry Therapeutics as CSO.