Dr Stephen Ward

Stephen was appointed as Chief Operating Officer of the Cell Therapy Catapult In January 2013. He brings over 17 years of biological medicine research, development, and manufacturing experience to the organisation. Stephen enjoys converting early research ideas into regulatory compliant products for patients and has developed and validated scalable, commercial manufacturing processes for cell based medicinal products, vaccines, and recombinant biologicals using Quality by Design principles. In addition, his recent interests have been in the use of multi-disciplinary commercial/academic programmes (early in the product lifecycle) to predict the effects of manufacturing stress upon cell-based therapies.

Prior to joining the CT Catapult, Stephen worked for Stabilitech, Onyvax, and Medeva. Stephen was Development Director at both Onyvax and Stabilitech. At Stabilitech he led the exploitation of the company's vaccine and biopharmaceutical stabilisation platform, and expanding it into the cell therapy arena. At Onyvax he played a key executive role in the whole-cell cancer vaccine programme and at Medeva he worked on the hepatitis immunotherapy and antigen delivery platform. Prior to this he worked with Prof. Wren at Bart's Medical School and Prof. Dougan at Imperial College developing novel bacterial vaccines.

Stephen is chair of the BIA's Manufacturing Advisory Committee, actively promoting and supporting UK bio-manufacturing at Government as well as grass root level. He, also, sits on various academic Advisory Boards. His first degree was from the University of Birmingham, specialising in Infection and Immunity, and his second degree from the Medical School of Southampton University developing group B meningococcal vaccine candidates.