Dr Geoff Banda
Geoff has quality control and quality assurance industrial experience in food manufacturing and cook-chill processes in airline catering. This industrial experience leveraged his laboratory training and experience in microbiology, rapid diagnostics of enteric bacteria using a DNA probe, genetic fingerprinting in fish and gene regulation and differential expression in sorghum, a plant key to food security in semi-arid African climatic zones.
After a mid-career change he became a corporate banker, financing manufacturing, telecommunications, fabrication, vehicle assembly, agro-processing, seed (maize, tobacco and cotton) production companies and service industries.
Geoff combines his natural science, as well as practical industrial and enterprise financing experience, with social sciences to do interdisciplinary work on commercialisation of emerging technologies, in particular Regenerative Medicine in the UK. The work investigates regenerative medicine development in the UK and whether industry and healthcare systems are ready to promote and adopt innovation. This involves tracking developments in cell therapy manufacturing, clinical trials, technology assessment and re-imbursement to capture the interplay between business models, value chains, innovation ecosystems, measures of clinical utility, and patterns of regulatory oversight in the UK and Europe.
Geoff also has research interests in African local pharmaceutical production, focusing on its link to health security, health systems strengthening, economic development and industrial capability upgrading that can impact access to cheap, quality, efficacious and safe medicines.
Geoff is based at the University of Edinburgh Innogen Centre
