Team
Dr Rob Rule – CEO and Co-founder
Rob has more than 30 years’ experience as a business leader spanning multinational blue-chip companies to start-up ventures in several different market sectors from chemicals to automotive to biotech. Early in his career, he spent 10 years with ICI/DuPont in a variety of roles, including Business Manager for DuPont’s European polyester business. After DuPont, he joined the board of a biotech business (Micap PLC) and played a significant role in the flotation of the company on AIM, raising a total of around £10m of investment. Rob then spent several years in venture capital investment working with IP Group PLC (as Managing Director of their Leeds subsidiary, Techtran Ltd) and with the Liverpool Seed Fund.
In the last 10 years, Rob has been a director of Hexadex Ltd, a privately-owned international group of engineering companies. He joined the group in 2010 to set up a new division to recycle Diesel Particulate Filters and other components from exhaust systems. He subsequently joined the group board with responsibility for M&A and strategic corporate development. He left his full-time role with Hexadex in December 2020 but retains a NED position within the group. Rob has a degree and PhD in Physics and a Business Master’s degree.
Professor David Hornby – Chief Scientific Officer and Co-founder
David is Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Sheffield and left his full-time role in August 2020. He has an international reputation in the field of enzyme structure and function with over 200 publications and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology in 2015. David held postdoctoral positions in Leeds and Basel, Switzerland before his appointment as Professor of Biochemistry at Sheffield in 1999, where he was subsequently elected as Head of Department from 2007-2012. He also had sabbatical visits in the USA (Scripps Institute), Germany and Switzerland.
David has acted as an external examiner for 8 UK universities including Cambridge and Imperial College and sits on the Hungarian Scientific Review Board for national awards in molecular biology. Outside his academic research interests, he has extensive industry contacts and has acted as consultant or secondee with several international biotechnology companies in the US and Europe. He has also played a key role in the development of school science programs in the UK (notably with the Northern Schools Trust and UTC Liverpool).
Dr David Pears – Non-Executive Director
David is an experienced Chief Technical Officer and senior manager with over 35 years’ experience in product R&D and commercial exploitation, including many years at senior management and board level within both large and small companies operating within the specialty chemicals sector. David has deep expertise in polymer chemistry and applications in fast moving consumer goods, printing, coatings, adhesives, agchem and pharmaceutical sectors.
David’s early career was with ICI/Zeneca/Avecia in a variety of product R&D roles, including a three year overseas placement. More recently David has been CTO at Reaxa, Revolymer/Itaconix and G2O Water Technologies. David has also been on the boards of Reaxa, Zentraxa and G2O Water Technologies. David runs his own consulting business seeking to help early-stage companies in the chemicals sector. David holds a PhD in synthetic organic chemistry.
James Florence – Research Scientist
James has a First-Class degree in Molecular Biology from the University of Sheffield, combined with a PhD in protein engineering which was conducted in collaboration with a European industry partner. James has extensive experience in laboratory techniques for the development of enzymes along with computational biology skills. He is leading several Entropix activities including customer enzyme developments and integrating our in silico strategy with automation of our Directed Evolution pipeline.
Rhys Diggins – Research Scientist
Rhys achieved a First-Class degree in Biology from the University of Swansea where he was also awarded the OUP Prize for academic achievement and the Royal Society of Biology Prize for his research project. He also has an MSc in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology with distinction from the University of Sheffield. Rhys has a wide range of skills in bioinformatics, statistics, bioengineering and protein production. His work with Entropix covers the full range of enzyme development and optimisation.
Jodie Ashford – Research Scientist
Jodie is an expert in computational biology and machine learning. She was awarded a First-Class degree in Biology followed by an MSc with Distinction in Computer Science from the University of Aston. Jodie recently completed a PhD in the prediction of biological properties from protein sequence data using machine learning techniques, an area in which she has achieved several academic publications. At Entropix, Jodie is leading projects in machine learning and computational development to analyse and predict enzyme function based on gene sequence data and other information produced in our Directed Evolution pipeline.
Józef Krzak- Research Scientist
Józef has first-class honours degrees in Biochemistry (BSc) and Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (MSc) from the University of Sussex and The University of Sheffield respectively. He brings specialist laboratory experience in protein expression and purification, molecular cloning, western blotting, enzymatic assays, CRISPR-Cas9 systems, chromatography, and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) techniques. Józef’s thesis focused on the mutagenesis of a methyltransferase gene and evaluating changes in its activity for the purpose of future development of a machine learning algorithm. He was awarded ‘The Best Performance by an MSC Student in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology Prize’ by The University of Sheffield. He is now continuing an aspect of his Masters’ project related to random mutagenesis at Entropix and is a part of the enzyme development team.
Entropix Technology & Directed Enzyme Evolution
Entropix combines capabilities in genetic engineering, enzyme discovery, computational gene sequence analysis, enzyme structure analysis and machine learning to harness the power of evolution.
Our Directed Evolution Pipeline, comprising of five fundamental stages, enables the development of novel enzyme products that demonstrate application-specific characteristics. By applying our in silico accelerated biological processes, we engineer unique enzyme sequences that have the potential to solve global challenges in a variety of sectors, including plastics, diagnostics, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and food ingredients.
About Entropix
Entropix is an early-stage enzyme development company founded by Dr Rob Rule and Professor David Hornby that specialises in the directed evolution of high-performance enzymes and biocatalysts.
Based in Cheshire and aided by recent investment, Entropix is developing a portfolio of novel proteins and a technology platform to overcome the barriers in delivering a truly sustainable economy.