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BioCity Scotland
BioCity Scotland, a centre providing laboratories and office space to life sciences companies near Glasgow, UK, has appointed Diane Harbison as Managing Director.
BioCity Scotland has been running since early 2012, as a joint venture with Roslin BioCentre, following the acquisition of a former Merck & Co. research facility at Newhouse, Scotland.
It has 130,000 sq ft of high-specification chemistry and biology facilities, which it rents to the bioscience and pharmaceutical industries. Equipment includes Nuclear Magnetic Resonance machines, Mass Spectrometers and High Performance Liquid Chromotagraphy machines.
Harbison is the former head of business development at Edinburgh’s BioQuarter. She holds a BSc and a PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Glasgow and an MBA from Henley Business School.
Her pharmaceutical career began with 10 years at Pfizer, where she worked on the Bioinformatics team and later the global business development group. She was responsible for the negotiation and alliance management of several major collaborations for Pfizer, including an agreement for Pfizer’s first stem cell therapy for the treatment of macular degeneration with University College London.
Under her leadership at BioQuarter, Harbison’s team established collaborations between University of Edinburgh academics and GSK under the pharma company’s Discovery Partnerships with Academia (DPAc) programme, leading to drug discovery pipelines for acute pancreatitis and liver fibrosis. Alliances were also created with Lilly, Biogen Idec and AstraZeneca.