John Ford PhD

Non-executive Director

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John has almost 20 years of fundraising, ion channel, drug discovery and drug development experience. In addition to being Investor Director at Metrion Biosciences, John is CEO of Ario Pharma where he leads programs designed to a develop TRP channel drugs for pain and CEO of Enterprise Therapeutics a company evaluating novel therapies for respiratory disease.

Previously, John was a co-founder of Xention Discovery Ltd where he was responsible for the K_v1.5 ion channel atrial fibrillation project which was partnered to Servier (up to 120M EUR).

Recently, John was a member of the Executive Team at Dezima that developed TA-8995 for dyslipidaemia (The Lancet) and sold the company to Amgen ($300M upfront, potential deal size of US$1.55bn + royalties).

Other positions include Team Leader for Receptors and Channel Drug Discovery at BioFocus plc in Cambridge, UK. He obtained his PhD at the University of Leeds where he worked on the structure and function of TRP channels.