About Us

CEO and founder

Jackie Hunter, PhD, CBE, has over 20 years of Pharma leadership experience, most recently as SVP at GlaxoSmithKline, developing their external R&D innovation strategy. Prior to this she was accountable for discovery and early clinical development in Gastroenterology and Neurology. She has played significant roles in the implementation and governance of major international industrial and public-private partnerships. 

Principal Consultants (UK):

Michael R. Barnes, PhD, has over 15 years pharma and biotech R&D experience leading Computational Biology & Informatics teams. As a co-founder of OI Pharma, Michael brings a strong focus on translational research and pre-competitive collaboration to the team, at GSK he co-led an EFPIA team to gain funding for the IMI OpenPhacts project - which is creating open informatics resources for drug discovery. Recently appointed as Director of Bioinformatics at the William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Mary University of London, Michael specialises in using Open Innovation as a tool to improve the translational and collaborative interface between industry and academia.

Elisabeth Goodman, MSc, MCLIP has 25 years' Pharma R&D experience at Merck Sharp & Dohme, GSK and its legacy companies, where she held management roles in Information Management, and provided internal training and consultancy to scientific, clinical and business teams. She is a trainer, facilitator, one-to-one coach, speaker and writer, with a proven track record in improving team performance and leading business change projects on a global basis.  As an OI Pharma Partners co-founder, Elisabeth brings accredited experience in change management and Lean Six Sigma to the team, along with her expertise in knowledge management. Elisabeth also runs her own consultancy, RiverRhee Consulting (http://www.riverrhee.com), with a focus on helping Life Science and business teams enhance their effectiveness for greater productivity and improved team morale.

Principal Consultants (US):

Rick Keenan, Ph.D, has over 25 years experience in drug discovery and actively consults for biotech, venture capital and large pharmaceutical company clients.  While at GSK, Rick spearheaded open and collaborative approaches to industry-wide research on neglected tropical diseases and led the efforts to publish whole cell malaria screening data online.  In 2005, Rick was a founding member and Vice-President of the Center of Excellence for External Drug Discovery (CEEDD) and part of the leadership team responsible for managing a diverse drug discovery portfolio of existing and newly established alliances. Over the course of his research career in medicinal chemistry, Rick Keenan contributed directly to the discovery of numerous clinical development compounds from a variety of therapeutic areas, including two marketed drugs: the Angiotensin Receptor blocker Teveten and the TPO receptor agonist Promacta. He is listed as an inventor over thirty patents and has authored more than fifty research publications. 

Rick graduated Magna cum Laude from the University of Pennsylvania and obtained a Ph.D. in organic chemistry at Stanford University with Professor Paul Wender.

Our Associate Partners:

We have access to a very broad network of associate partners active in the scientific areas where you need to innovate

Join Us:

If you are a life science professional with a passion for Open Innovation then we want to hear from you