Avacta appoints Philippe Cotrel as chief commercial officer
pharmafile | January 25, 2016 | Appointment | Manufacturing and Production, Research and Development | Avacta
Cotrel joins Avacta from Abcam, where he held the role of commercial operations director.
He will lead the Group’s commercial strategy and business development activities, and will drive the commercialisation of the Affimer technology as both research reagents and biotherapeutics.
Dr Cotrel, a protein chemist by training, has over twenty years’ commercial experience in sales, marketing and customer support in the life sciences sector having held senior positions in Amersham Pharmacia Biotech, Oxford Glycosciences, Affymetrix and Abcam. Whilst at Affymetrix, at that time the inventor and market leader of commercial microarrays, Philippe was appointed general manager and vice president of commercial operations in Europe with responsibility for European commercial operations, generating approximately £65m in sales made up of capital equipment, consumables and services.
He joined Abcam in 2008 as Commercial Director and has been responsible for sales and marketing activities, successfully growing revenue from £36.7m to £144m over a 7-year period. He managed regional offices in Boston, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai and was responsible for all global customer facing functions, as well as business development activities for the service and in vitro diagnostics divisions of the business.
Avacta’s principal focus is on its proprietary Affimer technology; a novel engineered alternative to antibodies that has wide application in Life Sciences for diagnostics, therapeutics and general research and development. Avacta has a pre-clinical biotech development programme with an in-house focus on oncology and bleeding disorders as well as several partnered development programmes.
Dr Alastair Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Avacta, says: “I am delighted that Philippe has joined the team at Avacta to drive the commercial strategy and lead the commercial operations for the Affimer technology. I am very confident that his wealth of market knowledge and experience will allow Philippe to build on our early successes to help deliver the potential of this exciting technology.”
Commenting on his appointment, Philippe Cotrel says: “I am very pleased to be joining Avacta at this exciting point in the development of the Affimer technology. I see many opportunities to leverage the unique strengths of Affimer reagents to provide a new set of tools for life science researchers, and to complement antibodies. The additional potential of Affimer as a therapeutic platform is very significant and I relish the opportunity to work with the senior leadership team to drive the commercial strategy forward.”
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