Our Team
Afortiorio Bio is founded by experts in the development of commercial medicines. Decades of experience allows us to lead the change in pharmaceutical innovation, redefining the boundaries of modern healthcare.
Dr. Nicola Wall, PhD
Chief Executive Officer
Dr Nicola Wall is a true entrepreneurial leader. Her most recent company formation, Afortiori Bio, is the culmination of an ambition to develop better medicines. Formed in 2025, the company will address unmet need in liver diseases using first in class RNA therapeutics.
She is a clinical development expert with 25 years extensive experience across the biopharmaceutical, medical device, and healthcare sectors. She has a proven track record of founding and scaling a successful international business, Afortiori Development, to deliver research services across the UK, EU, and the USA. She has an exceptional background within the pharmaceutical, medical technology and healthcare sectors with decades of diverse experience designing clinical development strategies to ensure robust evidence is gathered from a systematic, lean testing process.
Nicola excels as a leader in her field with key strengths in strategic planning, process re-engineering, systems implementation and organisational design and has worked with a number of clients to address these challenges when it comes to clinical trials. She has also worked for several years as an independent consultant for the UK NHS working on hospital operational planning, business cases and ways to implement new models of care providing a solid understanding of the critical the role of our healthcare institutions.
She continues to serve as an EIT 'Supermentor' and an expert judge on a Horizon panel (formerly Horizon 2020) and is a mentor for a range of accelerator programmes, including MATTER Chicago, EIT Health, and other international communities supporting early-stage companies, academic founders and aspirational start-ups.
She is passionate in her desire to work with highly motivated and respected peers in addressing unmet medical need and has founded Afortiori Bio to develop medicines with a like-minded group of professionals.
Dr Pauline Lukey is an exceptional CSO. An entrepreneurial leader and drug discovery expert, she has over 30 years of pharmaceutical and biotech experience, including 10 years as Founder & Managing Director of Target to Treatment Consulting Ltd. Pauline’s proven track record of building and scaling a successful consultancy serving 36+ global clients across pharmaceutical companies, biotech firms, venture capitalists, and academic institutions means that she is well placed to serve on the executive leadership team of her latest endeavour, Afortiori Bio. Her particular specialisation includes fibrotic diseases, rare diseases, and immunopathology.
Pauline’s expertise spans the entire drug development pathway from target identification to clinical proof of concept. She has advised clients on many aspects of the development pathway including target qualification, translational sciences, dose selection, clinical pharmacology, benefit/risk management, clinical trial design, biomarkers, indication prioritization, and competitor landscape analysis.
Pauline’s extensive knowledge and experience means that she combines deep scientific knowledge with exceptional business acumen, having successfully led multimillion-dollar projects at GlaxoSmithKline where she headed up the Early Development group. She has provided strategic guidance to shape the future of drug development across multiple therapeutic areas. She has acted as strategic advisor for ML/AI applications in accelerating drug discovery and development, supporting the Strathclyde/Nottingham/GSK partnership in advancing artificial intelligence applications in pharmaceutical R&D. Pauline’s commitment to superior drug development processes means that she maintains her thought leadership role and works with bioinformatics experts around the world to ensure current as well as frontier knowledge.
A recognized thought leader in translational medicine, biomarker development, and clinical trial design, she has over 120+ peer-reviewed publications, 7000+ citations and active involvement in academic leadership roles. She joins Afortiori Bio to oversee the development of its exciting portfolio of medicines leading the charge to ensure smart molecules can be developed into smarter medicines.
Dr. Pauline Lukey, PhD
Chief Scientfic Officer
Dr. Elizabeth Tully, PhD
Chief Development Officer
Dr. Elizabeth Tully is a visionary healthcare innovation leader with 20+ years of proven excellence in clinical research management, MedTech and Pharma commercialisation, and strategic healthcare delivery. She is adept at scaling innovative healthcare and biopharmaceutical products, focusing on evidence-driven processes while accelerating clinical development timelines and reducing costs for biotech and pharmaceutical clients seeking streamlined pathways to regulatory approval.
Elizabeth has built comprehensive expertise spanning clinical trial management, regulatory compliance, technology commercialization, and strategic stakeholder engagement across government, industry, and academic sectors, with a proven track record of securing competitive funding as a Principal Investigator and managing €15M+ research portfolios. Elizabeth built and scaled Xenon Health Solutions from inception into an established healthcare innovation consultancy serving government agencies, MedTech startups, and Pharmaceutical companies across Ireland, Europe, UK and USA. She has served as strategic clinical advisor to more than 20 MedTech startups, providing end-to-end commercialization support and clinical strategy design from regulatory pathway to market entry strategies. Her work has directly influenced national healthcare policy and clinical practice guidelines and she has 69 peer-reviewed publications, H-index 25, 2,748+ citations demonstrating sustained scientific impact.
She successfully managed the HRB Mother & Baby Clinical Trials Network, overseeing 25+ international clinical trials with a €15M budget and 100+ research professionals. She was instrumental in securing multiple competitive international grants totalling €10M through comprehensive bid coordination and strategic planning, while pioneering innovative patient engagement strategies that reached 100K+ healthcare consumers.
Elizabeth is an established clinical research expert with a wide network of collaborators and industry experts equipped to manage and deliver the specialised programmes that will comprise her portfolio at Afortiori Bio. She is posed to lead on securing strategic partnerships with key stakeholders to facilitate development of the products in her portfolio.
Elizabeth Ralph, BSc
Chief Operating Officer
Elizabeth is a proven clinical research entrepreneur with 30 years of excellence delivered in company leadership, quality assurance, process refinement, regulatory compliance and global clinical operations She has built a regulatory compliant, full-service Clinical Research Organisation from inception, through to established international operation with an offer to buy achieved in 2022 from a global company with plans for expansion into clinical research services. She has established an international executive and operations team equipped to deliver specialized services to medical device and biopharmaceutical sectors through a comprehensive service portfolio including clinical trial design, management, biostatistics, regulatory affairs, and quality assurance, securing strategic partnerships with niche service providers to offer comprehensive clinical development solutions to clients to enable the delivery of excellent service.
She has led the creation of robust, regulatory compliant, operational frameworks, processes, tools and templates to enable faster clinical development timelines for biotech and pharmaceutical clients and efficient, measurable service delivery.
She served as Co-Chair of the UK CRF Network National Patient & Public Involvement (PPI) workstream, working to improve research and also implemented a quality oversight structure ensuring ICH-GCP compliance and regulatory inspection readiness across facility operations and managed communications and media relations including health TV programming and facility promotion materials. She has led the delivery of multiple service improvement projects for the UK's premier clinical research infrastructure and was instrumental in the securing of £3M+ continued NIHR funding through comprehensive bid coordination and strategic planning.
She has collaborated globally to strive for excellence across clinical operations for one of the world’s largest CROs, lead training activities and regulatory compliance with a first-time approach to quality. She also has a proven track record in regulatory inspection preparation and audit management. She is currently scaling Afortiori Bio as Chief Operating Officer and is poised to create the necessary infrastructure needed to scale the required operational framework.