Richard Barker (healthcare consultant)

Richard Barker is a British healthcare professional consultant, speaker, and author. He is known as the Director of the Centre for the Advancement of Sustainable Medical Innovation (CASMI).^[1]

Early life

Richard Barker was born on 18 October 1948 in South London. He attended Alleyn's School^[2] in Dulwich, London, until the age of 18.

Higher education

Richard Barker was educated at Exeter College Oxford,^[3] where he received a Bachelor's degree in Chemistry. Following completion of his degree, he researched biological applications of magnetic resonance techniques in pursuit of an Oxford^[4] DPhil and in post-doctoral studies in Munich, Germany ^[5] and Leeds, England.^[6]

Career

Barker's business career has included work in both Europe and the US.^[7] He worked for McKinsey^[8] between 1980 and 1993, where he headed the European Healthcare practice^[9] and advised UK, Swiss and US pharmaceutical companies. He also helped establish 'London First',^[10] a public/private initiative that aims to enhance London’s status as a global city. As General Manager of IBM's healthcare business,^[11] between 1993 and 1996 he launched Healthvillage, one of the earliest Internet healthcare applications.^[12] At Chiron,^[13] a multinational biotechnology firm that was acquired by Novartis in 1996, he headed the diagnostics business, which brought the latest immunodiagnostics to market.^[14] He subsequently served as chairman and chief executive of Molecular Staging,^[15] whose genome amplification technology enables gene sequencing on rare DNA samples.^[16]

On returning to the UK, he headed the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) for six years between 2004 and 2011^[17] and initiated policy programmes in stratified medicine,^[18] while also launching frameworks for translational partnerships between academia and industry.^[19] He formed and chairs Stem Cells of Safer Medicines,^[20] a public/private partnership formed to develop new approaches to testing potential new medicines for toxicity.

With colleagues in Oxford and UCL, he has formed CASMI to develop, test and promote new models of medical innovation, including adaptive licensing, cell therapy regulation and a combination of therapeutic and diagnostic products to focus treatments on the patients most likely to benefit.^[21]

He chairs the South London Academic Health Science Network,^[22] which aims to improve the quality and consistency of care in that part of the National Health Service (NHS), and to facilitate innovations emerging from academic and industrial research into NHS application.^[23]

Board memberships

• Celgene Corporation^[24]

Published works

Books

• Barker, Richard (2010). 2030: the Future of Medicine, Oxford University Press, 118 pages. ISBN 978-0199600663

Articles

• Barker, Richard W.; and Sarah Garner. "Adaptive drug development and licensing", Regulatory Rapporteur, Vol 9, No 10, page 13, October 2012.
• Barker, Richard. "A flexible blueprint for the future of drug development", The Lancet, Volume 375, Issue 9712, pages 357-359, 30 January 2010.

References