New England Scot of the Year Sponsor interview with Mark Bamforth
Mark Bamforth
Mark Bamforth is a serial entrepreneur, having founded, built, and sold three companies. He is currently mentoring and investing in Scottish and US-based entrepreneurs and is a General Partner of the Kineticos Anti-microbial Resistance Accelerator (KAMRA) Fund I..
Bamforth founded Arranta Bio to build the best-in-class advanced therapeutics contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO), in May 2019 with a focus on microbiome, plasmid and mRNA vaccines. Arranta was sold to Recipharm in April 2022.
Previously, Bamforth founded Brammer Bio, a best-in-class viral vector CDMO for cell and gene therapies. Brammer’s team grew from 110 in 2016 to over 600 in Florida and Massachusetts, at the time of its acquisition by Thermo Fisher Scientific in April 2019.
In 2010, Bamforth founded a biologics CDMO, Gallus BioPharmaceuticals, and acquired a world-class facility and team in St. Louis, MO, with a commercial supply agreement with Janssen. Gallus tripled through organic growth and merging with Laureate Biopharma. Gallus was sold to DPx Holdings B.V. in 2014.
Bamforth previously spent 22 years in the UK and USA at Genzyme Corp., latterly running the 12-site global manufacturing operation and a pharmaceutical CMO business and serving as a corporate officer for 9 years. He began his career as a petroleum engineer exploring North Sea oil with Britoil, then as a chemical engineer in the whisky industry with Whitbread. Bamforth serves on the boards of Continuus Pharma, Pneumagen, Enterobiotix, Inceptor Bio, and Entrepreneurial Scotland. He has a BS in Chemical Engineering from Strathclyde University and an MBA from Henley Management College.
Q: Please share a brief overview of your current business.
A: My current focus is investing and mentoring life science companies in the US and
in Scotland, and as a General Partner of the Kineticos Anti-microbial Resistance
Accelerator (KAMRA) Fund I.
Q: What is your connection to Scotland?
A: I was born and raised in Glasgow, Scotland. After working in the North Sea oil industry, I moved to London, England to work for a brewing company before moving to a biotech company where I stayed for 22 years.
My wife is also Scottish and most of my family still lives in Scotland.
Q: The one thing you admire most about the Scots.
A: Scots are welcoming to strangers and friends alike and are generally very
sociable and fun to be with.
Q: Why have you decided to support the New England Scot of the Year Awards?
A: These awards are an opportunity to celebrate Scots who have made their home
in New England and to get together for a good Scottish celebration!
Note of Thanks:
Scots in New England thank Mark Bamforth for becoming a sponsor of the New England Scot of the Year 2023 Awards.
