Greater Glasgow Area
High-Throughput GMP Production Manager. Here I lead a team of manufacturing scientists to deliver patient-specific peptides for use by our clients in neoantigen vaccines. My focus is fixed upon continuous personal development (for both myself and my team), manufacturing excellence, and customer satisfaction.
As Production Manager, I have the responsibility for the delivery of multiple manufactures, for multiple clients, across multiple platforms. My time is spent leading a growing team to deliver GMP peptides for early phase clinical trials. I focus on upholding the standards of the platform, ensuring equipment is available for the right people at the right time, with suitably accepted raw materials and high quality manufacturing documentation. I have delivered significant improvements to delivery times through the high-throughput platform. I have led the team to deliver consistent market-leading delivery times in the ultra-high-throughput platform, and coached the team to deliver continuous improvement projects. The latter improved the quality of peptides that we supply.
In my role as Technical Leader at Almac Sciences (Scotland) I introduced and integrated a new platform for the ultra-high-throughput manufacture of hundreds of peptides on small quantities (circa 1 micromole). The role focused on the technical assessment and procurement of existing technology to meet new manufacturing demands from important clients. Over the course of a year I established a new lab, selected the equipment, negotiated discounts, oversaw the installation of all equipment and tailored the workflow to realise a novel manufacturing platform. This work culminated in Almac's ability to manufacture hundreds of patient-specific peptides, as crude product, within a 15 working-day turnaround time. Additionally, my role involved training staff on the platform, as well as leading a team of five.
Responsible for a number of process improvements, and scale up projects. Oversaw significant improvements in process equipment, safety equipment, and hazard assessments. Additional responsibilities included revamping KPIs for internal use, and introducing new tools to allow better tracking and improved reporting. Brought about a £70k saving to production costs across three projects. Mentor to three experienced chemists.
Responsible for technical transfer of in-house developed projects to cGMP production. Based in the Small Scale cGMP team, this role involved production of intermediates, final intermediates and APIs on up to kilo quantities, in vessels ranging from 500 ml to 30 litre. Campaigns carried out during the course of this role have varied from cGMP, registration batches, through to full validation batches. Furthermore, handling of potent, cytotoxic and highly reactive compounds was routine. The post required further activities such as chemist checks, interpretation of unfamiliar data and materials of construction testing. As would be expected, the role has provided me with an expert level of interaction with all cGMP documentation. Proficiency in working within clean rooms and handling materials within isolators was also gained. Finally, interaction with various teams, including QA, QC, development, project management and engineering was critical to performing the job in a timely fashion; this was aided by my naturally gregarious nature.
The GIST team write and publish articles centred on science which is of interest to the general public and scientific community at large. My role within the GIST team involves writing, editing and podcasting as well as limited contributions to the future of the orginisation.
Resynthesis of interesting compounds that were originally made during my PhD. These compounds are showing real promise to be taken forward into pre-clinical development and as such more experimental data is required. My time in this role will be spent synthesising oxygen sensitive compounds to be shipped of to collaborators in America for further enzymatic assays.