Cresset Establishes new Professional Services Division and Appoints Dr Martin Slater as Director of Consulting

Cresset has announced the establishment of a new Professional Services division and the appointment of Dr Martin Slater as its new Director of Consulting.

Martin joins Cresset from BioFocus where, as Senior Research Fellow, he underpinned the SoftFocus library brand with the development of innovative chemogenomic tools and the design of over 40 commercially successful protein targeted libraries.

“The appointment of Martin reflects the recent strategic expansion of Cresset’s Consulting Services business” said Rob Scoffin, Chief Executive Officer of Cresset.

Scoffin continued, “The Pharma and Biotech market is constantly evolving and changing, and the products and services we provide need to keep pace with these changes in order to continue to offer scientific insight and business value to our customers. The rapidly increasing demand for our expertise, demonstrated by our recent major collaboration with Redx Pharma, has led us to establish a dedicated Professional Services division. Martin’s unrivalled experience of using our tools on customer projects made him the ideal candidate to help drive this division forward.”

“This is a fantastic opportunity to join an exciting company with an excellent scientific reputation. The Cresset team has a world-leading portfolio of products and cutting edge technology for Medicinal and Computational Chemistry,” said Martin. “I am looking forward to delivering the power of these Field based tools on a wide range of customers’ drug discovery projects.”

Martin has 14 years’ experience in the highly dynamic pharmaceutical ‘fee for service’ environment in which he supported medicinal chemistry and a diverse range of programs.

After studying medicinal chemistry at the Universities of Huddersfield and Leeds, Martin joined the then start-up company BioFocus in 1997.

He pioneered the use of Cresset’s Field-based technologies at BioFocus for targets including GPCRs, Kinases, Ion channels and Proteases for library generation and de-novo ligand design.