Speakers

Dr Soumya Palliyil is the head of Scottish Biologics Facility, a recombinant antibody generation centre based at the University of Aberdeen. In this role she leads several industry funded biologics drug discovery and immunodiagnostic programmes and has generated >£3M research income as principal investigator at the Institute of Medical Sciences, University of Aberdeen. Currently, she is leading the commercialisation of a novel antifungal biologics drug discovery platform and mAbs, through the University of Aberdeen spin-out BrIgID Biologics. Supported through the Scottish Enterprise High Growth Spinout Programme (SE-HGSP), BrIgID will be set up through a combination of equity and non-dilutive grant funding. The company will focus on the preclinical and (early) clinical stage development of safer and efficacious monoclonal antibody-based treatments against life-threatening and drug resistant invasive fungal infections. Dr Palliyil has attained a PhD in Medical Biotechnology from the University of Aberdeen and was the award-winning associate for the best Knowledge Transfer Partnership in Scotland (2011) between the University of Aberdeen and Pfizer Inc. She held a Royal Society of Edinburgh Commercialisation Fellow during 2011-2012 and the recipient of the prestigious British Council/Commonwealth Scholarship which funded her Master’s by Research (MRes) at the University of Aberdeen