OBN, the membership organisation supporting the UK’s innovative life sciences companies, has appointed Mark Anderson, Brian Hargreaves and Ross Sommerville to its Board of Directors. Between them they add considerable sector experience to the Board, bringing legal, investment, commercial and general management expertise.
OBN also announced that, due to the demands of their respective roles outside of OBN, Stewart Sharpe and Steven Lee have stepped down from the Board.
Anderson is the founder and managing partner of a 12-lawyer firm of solicitors based in Oxfordshire that specialises in intellectual property and commercial transactions. He has advised clients in the life-science sector since 1987. He is the chairman of the Board of Directors of BioLaw Europe FmbA, a Danish not-for-profit association, and chairman of the Intellectual Property Law Committee of the Law Society of England and Wales.
Hargreaves is an independent advisor to Private Equity firms. His career in Healthcare spans academia, pharma, venture capital and private equity. Following his early career as a Lecturer in Pharmacy at Manchester University, he had a series of commercial and international marketing roles with Smith Kline and French, Mundipharma, Wellcome, Glaxo Wellcome and with Astra Hässle where he led the commercialisation of the blockbuster product, Nexium. In 1997, he moved to 3i plc in the innovative growth period of biotech Venture Capital. He currently advises selected Private Equity firms and spends a proportion of his time in the charity sector.
Sommerville is a business mentor and executive coach to companies in the life science sector. He has held senior commercial roles within MedTech; at ResMed where he ran business teams across a wide range of European countries and, before that, at Baxter Healthcare, where he was European VP Marketing for its Blood Transfusion business.In 2015, he spent eight months as Interim CEO of OBN where he helped review the strategy of the organisation and recruit the current CEO.
'We are delighted to welcome Mark, Brian and Ross to the Board,' said Sally Waterman, OBN’s Chairman. 'Each of them has provided support for life science companies of all types and sizes during their careers and we look forward to having their input into how OBN can best support the development and growth of innovative R&D companies.
'On behalf of the OBN Board, I would also like to thank Stewart Sharpe and Steven Lee for their valuable input, advice and guidance during their tenure and wish them every success for the future.'
