Owen Burbidge

Based in North East England, I am a Knowledge Transfer Manager for Medicines Manufacturing. I have a broad range of experiences working within industry for Pfizer in automated high-throughput drug screening, for small biotech manufacturing biological molecules at the Oxford Protein Production Facility, and for government working for the Defence Science and Technology Laboratories.

My academic background began in Biochemistry, however after working in industry I returned to academia to undertake a PhD in Pharmacology investigating novel antibody constructs for the detection and treatment of cancer and fell in love with process development and automation. After a short post-doctoral position at Imperial College London, I stepped out of the world of bench research and took up a role at Newcastle University managing the national Children’s Cancer and Leukaemia Group Tissue Bank. This is a multi-million pound piece of infrastructure, working across 20 NHS principal treatment centres for children and young people with cancer. A separate aspect of this role was supporting over 100 academic and clinical researchers across the globe working on over 250 different projects utilising human tissue samples donated by children, teenagers and young people with cancer.

I am currently on the board of a local LGBT+ charity and volunteer as a UK Research Ethics Committee member with the UK Health Research Authority.