Inivata Boosts Executive Team With Appointment of Clive Morris as Chief Medical Officer

CAMBRIDGE, England, May 25, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Inivata, a global clinical cancer genomics company employing the precision of circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) analysis to improve personalised healthcare in oncology, today announces the appointment of Professor Clive Morris as Chief Medical Officer. Clive will provide medical leadership across the clinical development programme, scientific collaborations, and through to commercialisation ensuring that Inivata's products help deliver significant improvements in clinical outcomes for patients.

Clive joins Inivata from Health Innovation Manchester, an initiative to develop an innovation ecosystem involving the decentralisation of £6bn per annum of health and social care services.  Previous to this, Clive worked for over a decade in various key roles at AstraZeneca, where he oversaw R&D and medical affairs projects and groups on a global scale, was involved in R&D strategy, investor relations, and most recently led the major transformation of AstraZeneca's UK strategic R&D sites and global HQ.  Clive is a proven leader in the biopharmaceutical industry and has extensive experience across all phases of drug development including seven marketed or close-to-market oncology products. He's accredited as a Pharmaceutical Medicine specialist by the UK Royal College of Physicians, as well as holding an Executive MBA and Honorary Professorship of Translational Medicine at the University of Manchester. Clive is also a non-executive director of Wheatsheaf investments and the recently launched InnovateUK Medicines Discovery Catapult.

Michael Stocum, CEO of Inivata, said, "We are delighted to welcome Clive to the Inivata executive team in this period of rapid growth following our recent funding round.  His oncology and medical expertise is fundamental to our success as we undertake a series of clinical studies to validate our broad molecular profiling ctDNA platform and move ahead with commercialisation.  I look forward to working with Clive in both our US and UK labs."

"Analysis of ctDNA has huge potential to help oncologists manage their patients more effectively and I look forward to helping Inivata play a major part in this transformation. I'm really pleased to be joining the team at such an exciting time for the company and the ctDNA field generally," said Clive Morris, Chief Medical Officer at Inivata.

Inivata recently completed a £31.5 million in Series A round, securing funds to accelerate clinical studies and validation of its technology platform for the analysis of ctDNA, (eTAm-Seq^[TM]) and commercialise its first products. Analytical validation, presented in April at AACR, showed its broad molecular profiling as a robust and reproducible method of detecting genomic alterations in ctDNA with high sensitivity and specificity. Inivata's proprietary platform will be applied across a spectrum of solid tumours to provide oncologists with clinically actionable information to stratify patients, monitor treatment progress, and identify emerging tumour resistance.

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About Inivata 

Inivata, a clinical cancer genomics company, is employing the precision of ctDNA analysis to improve personalised healthcare in oncology.  Using a simple blood test, circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) analysis is a new tool for oncologists to detect cancer, stratify patients, and assess individual response to treatment.  Inivata's proprietary technology is based on pioneering research from the Rosenfeld Lab at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute (CRUK-CI), University of Cambridge.  Inivata's assay provides a highly sensitive analysis of a strategically selected gene panel to identify actionable mutations for oncologists to treat their patients optimally. For more information and a full listing of investors, please go to http://www.inivata.com. Follow us on twitter @Inivata

Company Contact:
Liz Macfadyen
Email: liz.macfadyen@inivata.com
Phone: +44 (0)7739462323

Media Contacts
Consilium Strategic Communications
Chris Gardner/Laura Thornton
Phone: +44 (0)20 3709 5700
inivata@consilium-comms.com