James has been involved with Immunocore’s T cell receptor technology since 1999, when Avidex Limited (the predecessor company to Immunocore) was founded. He has over two decades of experience in biotechnology and has served on public and private boards of companies in the UK, the USA and Germany. He is currently Deputy Chairman at GW Pharmaceuticals plc, an AIM-listed biotech company, and is also CEO of Adaptimmune, Immunocore’s sister company focused on adoptive T cell therapy.

Dr Jakobsen founded Avidex in March 1999 and joined Avidex as full-time Chief Scientific Officer and Executive Board member in July 2000. Bent founded Avidex whilst he was at the Institute of Molecular Medicine (IMM) in Oxford, where he was head of the Immune Receptor Group from 1993 to July 2000. This group is recognised as one of the leading international laboratories in molecular immunology and is a world leader in recombinant immune receptor technology.  Prior to this, he was a Senior Research Fellow of the Danish Natural Research Council, Aarhus, Denmark. This followed three years as a Post-doctoral researcher at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology of the Medical Research Council in Cambridge.

Dominic has ten years’ experience across all phases of drug development having previously worked at Amgen and AstraZeneca. He obtained his MRCP in 1999 working in the NHS and his Master of Arts/medical/surgical degrees from Cambridge. He has published peer-reviewed articles on various elements of scientific and clinical research including work in Nature and the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Having gained a PhD in molecular biology from Cardiff University, Steve Megit has spent 10 years working in biotech business development on a variety of small molecule and biological therapeutics.

Yvonne has worked in both small biotech and large pharma companies in the early development of small molecules, cell therapy and biologics for cancer and autoimmune disease. She obtained her PhD from the University of Wales, College of Medicine in 2000.