Alasdair is one of Medilink Midlands most senior advisers with a wealth of knowledge and experience gained during his years in the life sciences and medtech sectors. Having spent a number of years working for a global pharmaceutical company and in academia, he was and is therefore, ideally positioned to be able to work with and support businesses facing the challenges of being able to commercialise their offering and drive growth in the life sciences and medtech sectors.
In his role as Innovation Adviser at Medilink Midlands, Alasdair provides expert business advice to start-ups and signposts them to the funding and services Medilink Midlands deliver to accelerate their innovation journeys. He is particularly passionate about helping businesses to tackle the challenges presented to them by Brexit and the pandemic head-on. In doing so, he is keen to be able to showcase what the Midlands has to offer and the role the region can play in the UK within the life sciences sector.
Alasdair began his career spending 20 years in the pharmaceutical industry and held a senior management position at AstraZeneca. Following which Alasdair joined Innovate UK as a Lead Specialist in Stratified Medicine providing strategic grant funding for SMEs across the diagnostic industry to accelerate their journeys from concept to commercialisation and to drive adoption within the healthcare sector.
Later Alasdair moved to the University of Leicester as Director of Business Development for the University of Leicester Precision Medicine Institute. His roles included Director of Research and Enterprise which involved obtaining research grant funding, knowledge transfer activities and driving commercialisation across the University of Leicester’s world leading research capabilities in Medicine and Space.
Owing to his extensive experience in the life science sector and knowledge of funding for UK start-ups, joining Medilink Midlands represented the perfect opportunity for Alasdair to continue to contribute to the industry and to support growing businesses in the Midlands; an area which he believes has suffered from significant underinvestment by successive governments.
Over the years as an Innovation Adviser, Alasdair has enjoyed watching companies succeed under the support of Medilink Midlands and seeing the impact their product or service has had on society.
When it comes to funding, Alasdair believes it is important for businesses to look at the bigger picture, as he explains: “When developing a pitch for funding, it is always necessary to remind companies of their end goal. They need to consider whether their product will sell, who is likely to buy it, and what they ultimately want to do with it.”
“At Medilink Midlands we believe in asking questions at every stage of the process and serving as the voice of the industry by communicating to funders and policy makers what companies really want and need.”
To learn more about our Innovation Advisers, visit our page here.