A medicinal chemist by training, John Montana brings over 30 years’ experience in drug discovery and early development across the pharmaceutical, biotech and contract research sectors. He joined Forbion from Charles River Labs (CRL) where he was Corporate Vice President, Integrated Drug Discovery in which he oversaw all aspects of partnered integrated drug discovery projects, ensuring their scientific progression from early business development discussions through to the delivery of quality clinical candidates.

Before joining CRL, John spent 10 years at Argenta initially as CSO and then Managing Director for the last 5 years. Within these roles John was responsible for the scientific strategy and operational direction and growth of the company and played a leading role in the sale of Argenta to Galapagos in 2010 and the subsequent sale of Argenta to CRL in 2014.

Prior to his time at Argenta, John was the founding CEO of Amedis, an academic spin out focused on the use of silicon in drug discovery. Following the merger of Amedis with Paradigm Therapeutics, he became CSO focused on the scientific strategy of merging the Amedis chemistry platform with Paradigm’s mouse single gene knock-out technology. Successful completion of these activities led to a research relationship in the CNS area with Takeda, which ultimately led to the acquisition of the company and the generation of Takeda Cambridge UK.

John spent the first 10 years of his career at Glaxo working across a range of therapeutic areas including GI, respiratory disease, CV and CNS before becoming Head of Chemistry at Chiroscience. During his time at Chiroscience he rose to the position of Research Director and following their acquisition by Celltech became Director of NCE Research for the company responsible for the small molecule pipeline from target validation through to the clinic.