Circassia Holdings Ltd

Sir Richard brings to Circassia 30 years of pharmaceutical industry experience, having led Glaxo and subsequently Glaxo Wellcome as Chairman and Chief Executive, and until 2002 as Chairman of GlaxoSmithKline. He is currently Rector of Imperial College London and is a Fellow of Imperial College School of Medicine, a Fellow of King's College London and a Fleming Fellow at Lincoln College Oxford. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society and Academy of Medical Sciences.

Sir Richard is currently Chairman of the UK Stem Cell Foundation and Chairs CATALYST, London's Council for the Advancement of Science and Industry. He is a Board member of the Higher Education Funding Council for England and Chair of the WHO International Advisory Board that oversees the International Clinical Trials Registry Platform.

Internationally, he is Chairman of the Singapore Biomedical Sciences International Advisory Council, Director of Bio*One Capital, the investment arm of the Singapore Economic Development Board, and a member of the International Advisory Panel of Temasek, which owns and manages the Singapore Government's direct investments. Sir Richard is also Senior Director of Rio Tinto Plc, Deputy Chairman of Lonza Group Ltd, Chairman of the Healthcare Advisory Group of APAX, Chairman of MerLion Pharmaceuticals Pte Ltd and a Non-Executive Director of Abraxis BioScience Inc.

Charles brings to Circassia nearly 30 years of corporate legal experience. Before joining PowderJect Pharmaceuticals Plc in 1996 as Executive Director, General Counsel and Company Secretary, Charles practised as a corporate lawyer in the City of London for over 15 years. While at PowderJect he was responsible for all legal, intellectual property and compliance matters, and managed the legal aspects of several major acquisitions and fundraisings, including the eventual sale of the company to Chiron for $1 billion in 2003.

In early 2004, he joined Zeneus Pharma as a Director and General Counsel, where he oversaw the company’s transactions, including the in-licensing of several products. Following its sale to Cephalon Inc, Charles left Zeneus Pharma and subsequently established Circassia with Steve Harris.

Steve brings a strong background of leadership and management from the biotechnology and specialty pharmaceutical sectors. Steve was a founder member of the management team that built Zeneus Pharma, following the acquisition of Elan’s European pharmaceutical business for $110m. Over a two-year period the business was restructured, refocused and turned around, and with Steve initially as CFO and subsequently promoted to CEO, Zeneus was acquired in 2006 by US biotech company Cephalon for $390m.

Prior to Zeneus, Steve spent 7 years at PowderJect Pharmaceuticals Plc as CFO, where he helped grow the business from a small loss-making private biotechnology business to a fully integrated and highly profitable publicly-quoted company. As the fifth largest vaccines business in the world, PowderJect was acquired by Chiron for $1 billion in 2003.

Rod has over 15 years international experience in the life sciences industry, gained in both multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Following an early career at Procter & Gamble, Wyeth and a period as Head of Project Management at Cortecs, he joined PowderJect Pharmaceuticals Plc in 1998. While there he held a number of positions of increasing responsibility, including Director of Programme Management and Vice President of Pre-Development. After PowderJect's 2002 acquisition of Circassia's development programmes, he established a virtual team to run the projects utilising an out-sourcing business model.

Following the acquisition of PowderJect by Chiron in 2003, he joined the Scandinavian drug delivery company OptiNose to set up the UK operating company. At OptiNose his management of the outsourced development team allowed the rapid progression of two drug-device combination products from concept, through phase I studies to the point of readiness to start phase II studies.

After twenty years in the industry, Tim has developed a broad base of expertise in clinical development, regulatory management affairs and medical affairs, gained in large pharmaceutical companies (GlaxoWellcome and MSD Research Laboratories), the biotechnology sector (Athena Neuroscience and Elan) and at the UK regulatory agency (the MHRA). He has played a key role in attaining seven regulatory approvals in the USA and in Europe (via the Centralised, Mutual Recognition and Orphan Drug procedures). He was previously Chief Medical Officer at Zeneus Pharma, where he was responsible for all medical and regulatory aspects of the company's product portfolio, and was a key part of the executive management team responsible for growing the value of the business more than threefold. He is currently Chief Medical Officer at Eusa Pharma.

Prof. Larché is a leading authority on immune system control, and original co-founder of Circassia. He has recently been appointed as a Professor in the Department of Medicine at McMaster University in Canada, after being awarded a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Allergy and Immunomodulation. Previously he was Reader in Respiratory Immunology at Imperial College London, Honorary Reader at the Royal Brompton Hospital and Asthma UK’s Senior Research Fellow. He was Chairman of the Asthma Section of the European Academy of Allergology and Clinical Immunology (EAACI) from 2001-2005, a member of the EAACI Executive Committee (2001-2005) and is currently a member of the British Society for Immunology's Vaccine Affinity Group Board.

Prof. Larché is an Associate Editor of Respiratory Research and a member of the editorial board of Clinical Experimental Immunology and Clinical Experimental Allergy. Prof. Larché has authored approximately 100 scientific papers and has been the recipient of several international prizes for his work including "The Respiratory 2000 International Young Investigator Award", "The Henning Lowenstein Research Award 2000" and the "Pharmacia Allergy Research Foundation Award" in 2001.

Professor Kay is one of the most distinguished clinical scientists in the UK and is recognised as a world-leading expert in the field of allergy and asthma. He is an original co-founder of Circassia and currently Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Investigator at Imperial College London, and Honorary Consultant Physician at both the Royal Brompton Hospital London and The London Clinic. He is a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal College of Physicians.

In 2005, he was awarded the prestigious Paul Ehrlich Medal from the European Academy of Allergology and Clinical Immunology (of which he is a past President) and in 2004 was elected an Honorary fellow of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. Prof. Kay has published over 300 papers in the field of allergy and asthma, as well as several monographs which have become key works in the area.