Professor Richard Knox B.Sc., Ph.D

Chief Scientific Officer, Morvus Technology/Gordian Pharma

After spending 15 years working in the molecular pharmacology unit in the drug development section of the Institute of Cancer Research (where the team received the Queen’s Award for Technological Achievement)  and the Oncology Department at Imperial College School of Medicine, Richard continued to work on finding cancer treatments that were less toxic than Carboplatin and Cisplatin.
 
During the early work, Richard and others discovered that the compound CB1954 demonstrated outstanding tumour selectivity, but the results in rats could not be repeated in humans.  A Phase I clinical trial combining CB1954 with EP-0152R in 2003 was unsuccessful.
 
As a world expert on the mechanisms of prodrug activation, particularly by nitro reductase enzymes, Richard was determined to discover the mechanism of action of the prodrug CB1954 and how to exploit the tumour selectivity for human use.  It was during this work he discovered MTL-004.  Richard was Chief Scientific Officer at Morvus at the time and it was decided to spin-out MTL-004 into a new company, Gordian Pharma, to continue the development of MTL-004.  Unfortunately Richard sadly passed away in 2022 before seeing the result of his lifetime’s work.
 
Richard spent the majority of his career working on chemotherapy, publishing two books and over 90 papers on the subject and, is a named inventor on over a dozen patents. He pioneered the measurement of platinum-induced damage on the DNA of cancer patients and the use of molecular biological techniques to probe DNA repair mechanisms. He was the first person to use such methods with clinically used alkylating and platinating agents.
 
In his spare time Richard had served as Chairman of the Salisbury branch of CAMRA and enjoyed vintage port.