Celebrating 15 Years of CatSci – From Catalysis to Integrated Drug Development Partner  

Fifteen years ago, CatSci was founded with a single, clear focus: to solve complex catalysis challenges in chemical process development. 

At the time, this was a defined and distinctive niche. Catalysis sits at the heart of efficient, scalable synthesis, and the ability to solve complex catalytic problems with speed and rigour was, and remains, genuinely valuable. But what started as deep specialist expertise in one area has become something much broader: a fully integrated scientific innovation partner, supporting drug development programmes from early-stage chemistry through to GMP manufacturing.  

This evolution didn’t happen by accident, rather through a combination of necessity and desire. Over the past decade and a half, the landscape has changed immensely; molecules have become increasingly complex, timelines have compressed, and the expectation for data-rich, insight-led decision-making across the development cycle has risen. In response, CatSci was built into what it is today: deliberately, investment by investment, capability by capability, in direct response to what our biotech and pharma customers needed next.

Our CEO and co-founder, Dr Ross Burn, said: “15 years since co-founding CatSci, I’m proudest of two things: the c.120 brilliant people who make up our team, and the many projects we’ve delivered for patients in need. While the business has evolved significantly over that time, those two things have remained constant. People and purpose have always been at the heart of CatSci, guiding how we’ve grown and the decisions we’ve made along the way.”

Our CCO and co-founder, Dr Simon Tyler, said: “When I started my career in pharma over 25 years ago, a medicine that I am taking now to help combat the cardiovascular disease that led to my father’s early passing was still being worked in the process development lab where I did my first experiments.  Healthcare challenges affect us all, directly and indirectly, and this fuels my unwavering focus on getting better medicines into the hands of patients.  CatSci has inevitably been a huge part of my life since we first nurtured our thoughts during 2010, and I have had the privilege of working alongside some fantastically talented and committed colleagues.  I am immensely proud of what they have achieved and the meaningful impact that CatSci has had in delivering hundreds of drug development projects.  It’s the only reason that CatSci exists.”  

2011-2015: Laying the Foundation 

CatSci began trading in May 2011 as an expert provider of catalysis R&D. The early years established the scientific rigour and customer-centric approach that still define how the business operates today. 

By January 2015, it was clear that the problems customers needed to solve extended well beyond catalysis, and that addressing isolated challenges was no longer enough. Route design decisions dictate process development. Analytical insight shapes scalability. Early chemistry choices can determine whether a programme flies or stalls at a later stage at a later stage. Recognising this, by the start of 2016 CatSci had broadened its focus to become an end-to-end pharmaceutical process R&D partner, not by abandoning its roots, but by building on them. This marked a deliberate shift: from solving single problems to supporting entire programmes.  

2016-2022: Recognition, Expansion, and Evolution  

The years that followed brought significant recognition as growth accelerated. We were thrilled to see our dedication and delivery recognised by for the first time by the industry: CPhI Worldwide Award for Excellence in Pharma in 2018, Cardiff Business Awards International Business of the Year in 2019, and Wales STEM Scale-up of the Year in 2020, to name a few.  

After navigating the pandemic, at the back end of which we were able to open our dedicated analytical laboratory in Dagenham, a momentous milestone for us came in April 2022, when CatSci was awarded the Queen’s Award for Enterprise: International Trade, the most prestigious business accolade awarded in the UK.  A huge honour, we were immensely proud of this fantastic achievement. For a company founded just over a decade earlier in a Cardiff start-up incubator, it was a profound marker of how far the business had come. Working with four of the top five global pharmaceutical companies, operating across 13 countries, and with a staff where around 80% hold a PhD, the award reflected not just commercial success but scientific credibility on an international stage. As the team put it at the time, it was about “putting Wales on the pharmaceutical industry’s international map.” 

Two months later, in June 2022, Keensight Capital, one of Europe’s leading growth buyout investors, made a significant investment in CatSci. It was a vote of confidence in both the business model and the ambition behind it. Keensight’s track record in the healthcare and pharma services space, combined with their international network, provided the platform to accelerate what the founding team had already set in motion: GMP capabilities, oligonucleotide services, site expansion, and ultimately, a broader and more enhanced scientific offering. 

These weren’t just milestones, though. They were the achievements that made the next phase of CatSci’s evolution possible. 

Meanwhile, the investment in infrastructure was transforming what CatSci could offer. After the analytical facility at Dagenham came a new material science laboratory later in 2021 and an oligonucleotides laboratory shortly after, expanding our Cardiff footprint.  

Each addition was driven by the same fundamental question: what does solving the next generation of drug development challenges actually require? 

2023 – 2026: Building for New Modalities  

The last 15 years have seen significant advances in the types of assets entering development as potential new therapeutics, as well as the technologies used to support them. Whilst we retained our expertise in small molecules, we understood that our customers’ needs were evolving towards all manner of synthetic medicines: highly complex small molecules, bifunctional chimeras, oligonucleotides, peptides, ADCs, and other conjugates. The common theme between them all being the relentless search for treatments to target the most challenging diseases.   

These demands informed CatSci’s continued evolution. We opened a state-of-the-art  SafeBridge-certified HPAPI laboratory in January 2023. GMP capabilities were established at Dagenham in late 2023. We acquired Reach Separations in Nottingham in 2024 to extend the business’s separation science and chromatographic purification expertise further still – emblematic of the broader direction of travel to better support the evolving demands of customers. 

The newest additions to CatSci’s capabilities reflect where new drug development, juxtaposing potency and targeting, is heading. We established a peptide R&D group in January 2025, followed by the opening of a dedicated peptide laboratory in June 2025 and, shortly after, a bioscience laboratory, both at our Nottingham site. This continued our meaningful expansion beyond traditional small molecule chemistry and marked CatSci’s first step into biological sciences.   

These are not incremental additions; they represent a deliberate move to empower our ability to tackle the increasingly complex, multimodal programmes that are defining modern drug development.   

Taken in the round, our trajectory has been driven not by the addition of services for their own sake, but by the explicit need to support more involved and interconnected development pathways. 

Scaling Without Losing Scientific Depth  

Growth at this pace can always dilute what made a business valuable in the first place and risk future success. CatSci’s approach to avoid that has been by investing in its people and infrastructure, building useful partnerships, and by ensuring that the scientific rigour that defined the early catalysis work remains the standard across every team and every discipline. 

Our ESG commitments reflect the same long-term thinking.  Recent EcoVadis Silver certification, MyGreenLab Green and Gold ratings, ISO 27001 accreditation, to name but a few, demonstrate our dedication to create a lasting, positive impact on people, the planet, and progress. 

International reach has grown, too. From our founding HQ in Cardiff, we now have 14 labs across three sites, and CatSci has become a recognised name across the global pharmaceutical industry — most recently hosting its first scientific conference and networking event in Boston in February 2026, following on from three such events in the UK in 2025. 

What This Means for Customers 

For the teams working on complex drug development programmes today, the significance of this evolution is practical. 

A partner that can take a small molecule, oligo, or peptide from early-stage route design through process R&D, analytical development and GMP manufacture, without losing the scientific, technical, operational and regulatory context that accumulates along the way, is a genuinely different kind of resource. That’s built-in CMC.   

That’s also what fifteen years of deliberate investment has created.   

Conclusion 

The story of CatSci so far is not simply one of growth, from five scientists to a team over 120 (and counting). It is one of evolution by intention, shaped by the changing needs of pharmaceutical innovators and a commitment to building the capabilities required to meet them.   

From catalysis to integrated drug development, our purpose has remained the same since 2011: to get medicines into the hands of patients in need, by solving the scientific and technical CMC problems that stand in the way.  

The science has changed. The modalities have expanded. The regulatory environment has evolved. The competitive landscape has tightened. The ambition has grown. But that commitment is exactly what it was when we founded 15 years ago.