oxford-chemistry
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Jonathan Montagu
Jonathan Montagu is the co-founder and CEO of HotSpot Therapeutics, a Boston biotech he started in 2017 to chase what the industry long called undruggable. His bet: target the 'natural hotspots' that evolution built into proteins to switch them on and off, and you can make small-molecule medicines with precision the old playbook couldn't reach. A chemist trained at Oxford, Scripps and Cancer Research UK with a Stanford MBA, he previously did the dealmaking that put Nimbus Therapeutics and Concert Pharmaceuticals on the map, including a $1B GSK transaction. Under him HotSpot has raised roughly $210M and pushed its Smart Allostery platform into the clinic, presenting first-in-human Phase 1 data on its CBL-B inhibitor HST-1011 at ESMO 2024.
Simon Jones
Simon Jones is the founder and CEO of Fluid Efficiency, a Caltech spin-out commercializing 'megasupramolecules' (MSMs), self-assembling polymers that make fuels harder to ignite in a crash and oil cheaper to push through a pipeline. An Oxford-trained inorganic chemist who spent years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jones is the industrial chemist who took a decades-old academic dream of safer jet fuel and figured out how to actually manufacture it at scale. He has collaborated with the original Caltech research team behind the technology since 2008.