Bradley Hardiman

Head of Europe, Search & Evaluation, Business Development at Astellas Pharma Europe

Bradley Hardiman serves as Head of Europe, Search & Evaluation within Business Development, leading a team responsible for exploring and identifying opportunities to unlock innovation for Astellas. This includes research collaborations with universities and biotech companies, in and out licensing, venture capital investment and mergers and acquisitions.

After starting his career in drug discovery research for large pharmaceutical companies, Bradley moved into advancing research to commercialisation predominantly within the university sector. Over 20 years, he gained diverse experience in establishing research collaborations, patent drafting, filing and prosecution, licensing, spin-out company creation and investment.

Notably, this included more than seven years within the Seeds Funds team at Cambridge Enterprise, the commercialisation arm of the University of Cambridge, helping to assess, invest in and create spin-outs founded on University research. These spanned numerous areas including therapeutics (such as small molecules, biologics and gene therapy), diagnostics and prognostics, medical devices, scientific instrumentation, reagents and digital health.

Bradley earned an undergraduate degree in Medical Biochemistry from Brunel University followed by a Master of Research in Molecular Biochemistry from the University of Cambridge. He also has an Executive MBA from Bayes (formerly Cass) Business School.