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Avacta Group plc, the developer of Affimer® biotherapeutics and reagents, has announced the appointment of Neil Bell as Chief Development Officer. Neil will be responsible for late stage pre-clinical and early clinical development of Avacta’s pipeline of pre|CISION pro-drugs and Affimer immunotherapies.
Neil Bell
Neil has over 30 years of valuable experience in the drug development industry. The early part of his career was spent in clinical development at Eisai and Pfizer before becoming Therapeutic Area Head at Ipsen. In each of these roles he led numerous Phase I to III clinical studies, gaining significant experience across all aspects of drug development: strategy, pre-clinical development, manufacturing, regulation and clinical study design and implementation.
In his role as Head of Global Clinical Operations for Teva Pharmaceuticals, Neil led an international team responsible for the delivery of clinical programmes in neurology, autoimmune and oncology therapeutic areas. During this period, he contributed to the development of Copaxone achieving leadership in the treatment for multiple sclerosis globally, as well as successfully introducing Azilect to global markets.
Following this period at Teva, Neil joined Daichi- Sankyo as Head of Clinical Operations where he led the clinical operations team through early and late stage development activities across the cardiovascular, pain and oncology areas.As well as this, he was responsible for building an effective drug development organisation in Europe, serving the global clinical programmes and leading to the successful global approval of Edoxaban.
Most recently, Neil held the role of Senior Vice President, Head of Global Clinical Operations at Autolus; a UK cell and gene therapy company backed by Syncona, which listed in the US in 2018 - a process in which Neil played a key role. At Autolus, Neil was responsible for building a functional global clinical operations team delivering Phase I/II clinical studies across the UK, Europe and US for acute lymphoblastic leukemia, multiple myeloma, B-cell lymphoma, and T-cell lymphoma. As well as this, he implemented the first commercially sponsored CAR-T study in the UK.
