Professor Chas Bountra

Chas is Chief Scientific Officer at BPGbio.

He was previously Professor of Translational Medicine (Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine; 2008-2026) and Professorial Fellow (Keble College) at the University of Oxford. He was the Founding Director of the ‘Centre for Medicines Discovery’ and worked with colleagues to establish a ‘Target Discovery Institute’, a ‘Dementia Drug Discovery Institute’ an incubator (‘BioEscalator’), and a national facility (Rosalind Franklin Institute’) to develop new drug enabling technologies.

As Pro-Vice Chancellor for Innovation – University of Oxford (2018-2025) he incentivised academics to create new companies, increased the number of female founders, created a university wide entrepreneurship training programme, built connectivity with > 300 university spinouts, science parks and large local science infrastructures, catalysed industry partnerships and enabled increased venture capital and philanthropic income. As Director of Oxford University Innovation, he has helped build arguably the best university technology transfer office, in the UK.

As Director of the Structural Genomics Consortium (2008-2020) he established a leading research group in human protein structural biology and epigenetics chemical biology, and arguably one of the most successful open innovation, public-private partnerships  in the world. The group generated several thousand drug discovery tools, enabled several thousand publications, proprietary programmes, and the creation of new companies.

As Vice President and Head of Biology at GlaxoSmithKline (2002-2008), he was involved in the identification of >30 clinical candidates for many gastro-intestinal, inflammatory and neuro-psychiatric diseases. In earlier roles in Glaxo or GlaxoWellcome, he was involved in the launch and development of the first treatment for Irritable Bowel Syndrome (Alosetron) and was the first to show that neurokinin NK1 antagonists are anti-emetic in preclinical and clinical studies.

In all these roles he has mentored and help grow the careers of many young researchers.

He has through Board roles advised many funders, charities, universities, research institutes, SMEs and pharma companies, and helped >40 teams of innovators and entrepreneurs create new commercial and social enterprises. His current passions are developing new treatments for rare diseases, cancer, dementia and multi-morbidities associated with ageing, and driving new approaches to improve the lives of patients living with psychiatric disease.