Owlstone Medical Appoints Serial Entrepreneur to its Board of Directors

Owlstone Medical Ltd., a global diagnostics company developing a breathalyzer for early disease detection and precision medicine, has added Dr. Andy Richards CBE to its board as a non-executive director. 
 
Richards is a serial entrepreneur and business angel with an established track record in founding and scaling up biotech and healthtech companies in the United Kingdom. His early career spans positions with ICI (now AstraZeneca) and PA Technology, and he was a founder and executive director of Chiroscience plc until its merger with Celltech in 1999. Since that time he has founded, invested in and helped to scale more than 25 ventures including Vectura, Arakis, Cambridge Biotechnology Ltd., and Geneservice. He received a CBE for services to life-science investment in 2015.
 
Richards joins current Owlstone Medical Board members Billy Boyle, CEO and Executive Chairman, Owlstone Medical; Dr. Bret Bader, CEO Owlstone Inc.; Prof. Chris Toumazou, Regius professor of engineering, chair in biomedical circuit design, director of the Centre for Bio-Inspired Technology and founder and chief ccientist for the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College; and Dr. Doug Wright, medical director at Aviva UK Health.
 
“Since its founding in 2016, Owlstone Medical’s development and growth have been remarkable,” Richards said. “Given the potential of its Breath Biopsy platform to transform precision medicine and the early detection of disease I have no doubt that this will only continue, and I am very pleased to be able to play a part as the business scales.” 
 
Richards is currently chairman of Arecor, Congenica, Abcodia, and the Babraham Research Campus, and is a director of Ieso digital health, Silence Therapeutics plc and Cancer Research Technology (commercial arm of CR-UK). He is an advisor to several investment funds including Cambridge Innovation Capital and the UCL Technology Fund and has been until recently a director of Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
 
Richards is a Cambridge graduate with a Ph.D. in chemistry and is a founder member of the Cambridge Angels.

Billy Boyle, co-founder and CEO at Owlstone Medical, said, “Andy has been a good friend and advisor to Owlstone Medical for some time, and we are thrilled to be able to formalize our relationship and directly benefit at the board level from his deep experience in the development and growth of early-stage life science companies. Andy’s guidance will have a significant impact on the business as we seek to establish Breath Biopsy as a new industry category and to achieve our goal of saving 100,000 lives.”
 
Owlstone Medical has developed a breathalyzer for disease. The company’s vision is to become the global leader in non-invasive breath tests for early disease detection and precision medicine across cancer, inflammatory disease and infectious disease with the aim of saving 100,000 lives and $1.5 billion in healthcare costs. Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy platform is creating a new industry category, based on the routine detection and analysis of volatile organic compound (VOC) biomarkers in breath, which has the potential to revolutionize healthcare. The ReCIVA Breath Sampler is the first standardized breath collection device designed to capture the VOC biomarkers present in breath, which are then analyzed using Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy services and products.
 
Owlstone Medical is developing breath tests for the early detection of lung and colorectal cancer. These are two of the most common cancer killers worldwide and represent multibillion dollar market opportunities. The company has an active clinical diagnostics/screening pipeline including the world’s largest breath-based clinical trials. The Breath Biopsy platform is also being deployed in the PAN cancer trial, a collaboration with Cancer Research UK studying the early detection of eight different cancer types in breath.
 
The company also sees a significant role for Breath Biopsy in precision medicine, where it can provide dynamic information about a patient’s disease activity and identify patients most likely to respond to a particular therapy. Breath Biopsy aims to ensure that the right therapy is given to the right patient at the right time, helping to improve patient outcomes and reduce healthcare costs. 
 
Owlstone Medical’s Breath Biopsy clinical laboratory is a unique, revenue generating capability that allows pharmaceutical, clinical and academic partners worldwide to explore breath-based biomarkers to optimize their own precision medicine activities.
 
Owlstone Medical was spun out of Owlstone Inc. in 2016 to develop and commercialize medical applications of its proprietary microchip chemical sensing technology, Field Asymmetric Ion Mobility Spectrometry (FAIMS), which is sold in the military and industrial sectors globally. The company has raised a total of $38.5 million in equity financing, and is backed by technology investor Horizons Ventures, and Aviva, a leading healthcare insurer. The company is headquartered in Cambridge, U.K.