About Viridian Bioscience
Viridian Bioscience is a new consultancy business focused on innovation. The company was incorporated in June 2015. Our ambition is to help our clients to “raise their innovation game”. Whether the goal is to win market share through incremental improvements to existing products or services or to develop and launch radically new products or services to satisfy market demand much better than the competition, Viridian is here to help.
Viridian Bioscience specializes in:
- Plant & Microbial Biotechnology
- Industrial Biotechnology
- Algal Biotechnology
- Pre-clinical development of biomedical technologies
- Fitness, Nutrition and Health
About Paul G. Thomas PhD MBA DIC BSc ARCS
Paul graduated with a BSc in Biochemistry from Imperial College in 1981 and immediately joined Celltech, the UK’s first biotechnology company. He was involved in the cloning and production expression of nature identical rennet (preprochymosin) in E.coli for cheese manufacture.
In 1984 he returned to IC to undertake doctoral research in Protein Engineering with Prof Sir Alan Fersht FRS. This research pioneered the manipulation of pH dependence of enzyme catalysis using the protease subtilisin BPN’ from B. amyloliquefaciens as a model system.
Paul joined ICI Agrochemicals in 1987 to apply biotechnology to agrochemical discovery and GM crop development. He was a named inventor on 47 patent applications first filed in the US and UK.
He was involved in a number of pre-competitive research collaborations with leading UK, US and European Universities:
- Microbial PROSAMO – academic/industrial consortium investigating horizonatal gene transfer between soil microbes
- 2-oxoglutarate dependent dioxygenases collaboration with the Universities of Oxford (Prof Chris Schofield) and Reading (Prof Philip John)
- Development of artificial plant chromosomes with Washington University St Louis (Dr Eric Richards) and the John Innes Centre (Prof Graham Moore)
In addition, Paul was the industrial supervisor for six PhD students under the BBSRC CASE award scheme. See Paul’s list of publications for further details
After 15 years in technical and management roles he became interested in pursuing a commercial career path and joined the University of Essex in 2002 as Business Development Manager as the technology transfer profession was growing. Since then Paul has been helping university academics to build relationships with industry and to commercialise inventions arising from their research.
In parallel with his role at Essex, Paul completed an executive MBA at the University of Bath in 2007. His research dissertation focussed on the link between “Innovation and Investability in the Biosciences” for which he was awarded the prize for best project.
In 2011 he transferred to Cambridge Enterprise Ltd as a Technology Manager in the Life Sciences team where he managed a vary large portfolio of IP assets spanning plant and industrial biotechnology, health, sports fitness, biosensors, medical devices and drug delivery systems based on novel polymers and many others.
Paul has been involved with BBSRC funded projects throughout his research and commercial career, in 2010 he was invited to join the BBSRC Follow on Fund committee. Paul chaired the panel from December 2012 to the end of 2015.
