Richard Barker is a British healthcare professional consultant, speaker, and author. He is known as the director of the Centre for the Advancement of Sustainable Medical Innovation (CASMI). Richard Barker was educated at Exeter College Oxford, where he received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry.
Following completion of his degree, he researched biological applications of magnetic resonance techniques in pursuit of an Oxford DPhil and in postdoctoral studies in Munich, Germany and Leeds, England. Barker’s business career has included work in both Europe and the US. He worked for McKinsey between 1980 and 1993, where he headed the European Healthcare practice and advised UK, Swiss and US pharmaceutical companies. He also helped establish ‘London First’, a public/private initiative that aims to enhance
London’s status as a global city. As General Manager of IBM’s healthcare business, between 1993 and 1996 he launched Healthvillage, one of the earliest Internet healthcare applications. At Chiron, a multinational biotechnology
firm that was acquired by Novartis in 1996, he headed the diagnostics business, which brought the latest immunodiagnostics to market. He subsequently
served as chairman and chief executive of Molecular Staging, whose genome amplification technology enables gene sequencing on rare DNA samples. On returning to the UK, he headed the Association of the British Pharmaceutical
Industry (ABPI) for six years between 2004 and 2011 and initiated policy programmes in stratified medicine, while also launching frameworks for translational partnerships between academia and industry. He formed and chairs Stem Cells of Safer Medicines, a public/private partnership formed to
develop new approaches to testing potential new medicines for toxicity. With colleagues in Oxford and UCL, he has formed CASMI to develop, test and promote new models of medical innovation, including adaptive licensing, cell therapy regulation and a combination of therapeutic and diagnostic products
to focus treatments on the patients most likely to benefit.
He chairs the South London Academic Health Science Network, which aims to improve the quality and consistency of care in that part of the National Health Service (NHS), and to facilitate innovations emerging from academic and industrial
research into NHS application.