Matthew Cooper is co-founder, Director and Chief Executive Officer of Inflazome, which develops inflammasome inhibitors for chronic inflammatory diseases.
Matt is also Co-Founder and Director of Defensin Therapeutics and Affiliate Professor at Trinity College Dublin. He holds a fractional Professorial Research Fellow appointment at the University of Queensland, where he is Professor of Chemical Biology at the Institute of Molecular Bioscience and, Affiliate Professor in the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biology.
Matt obtained his PhD in 1995 in organic chemistry, and a BSc from the University of Adelaide, Australia, before moving to the UK. In the UK he was a George Murray Fellow with Professor Dudley Williams at the University of Cambridge.
He subsequently spent nine years in start-ups and biotechnology companies and was founder and Managing Director of Cambridge Medical Innovations (now part of Abbott) and Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Akubio.
His work involved innovation, fund-raising, intellectual property generation, licensing, product development and commercialization. He also managed multidisciplinary research and development teams with programmes in electronics, physics, materials science, chemistry, microbiology, virology and diagnostics.
Matt returned to Australia in 2009 as NHMRC (National Health and Medical Research Council) Australia Fellow, University of Queensland, where he drove the research and development of infectious and inflammatory disease, diagnostics and therapeutics.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and a Fellow of the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences; a Member of the Royal Australian Society of Chemistry, a member of the Pfizer Australia Stakeholder Faculty, the Australian Society for Infectious Diseases and the Australian Society for Antimicrobials.
Matt is an inventor on more than 25 patents, has published 250 scientific articles and two books, and helped launch multiple medical technology products that are on the market today.
Matt has consulted extensively with pharmaceutical, biotechnology and diagnostics companies.