hVIVO has appointed Angela Hildreth as Chief Financial Officer, recruiting the finance chief of Futura Medical to a role the contract research organisation has been filling on an interim basis since the autumn. She joins the board as a director at the same time and takes up the post next month.
The appointment completes a succession the company set out earlier. Stephen Pinkerton announced his retirement in September and remained in post to the end of that month, with Richard Cotton serving as interim Chief Financial Officer in the gap. Hildreth will continue as a non-executive director of Futura Medical for a limited period to support the handover there.
Her record is squarely in small and mid-cap British life sciences. She joined Futura Medical in 2018 and held the combined Finance Director and Chief Operating Officer role, a pairing that is common in companies of that size and that gives a finance chief direct operational responsibility rather than a purely reporting remit. Before that she was at Shield Therapeutics, where she served first as Financial Controller and later as UK Finance Director. She also sits as a non-executive director and audit chair at Aptamer Group.
The combination matters for where hVIVO now sits. The company runs human challenge trials, a specialised and capital-intensive business in which volunteers are deliberately infected under controlled conditions so that vaccines and antivirals can be tested faster and in smaller cohorts than a conventional field trial allows. Revenue is contracted project by project, which makes the order book, the phasing of recognition and the utilisation of the quarantine facility the three numbers that determine the result in any given period.
That is an operational finance problem as much as a reporting one, and it explains the shape of the hire. A candidate who has carried a chief operating officer title alongside the finance role arrives understanding capacity planning rather than only forecasting from it.
The audit-chair experience is the other half of the fit. A company whose revenue depends on contracted milestones faces persistent questions about the timing of recognition, and a finance chief who has sat on the other side of that conversation as an audit chair is better placed to anticipate them.
hVIVO is listed on AIM in London and on Euronext Growth in Dublin, and the appointment gives it a permanent finance chief on the board ahead of the next reporting cycle. The interim arrangement that has covered the role since the autumn now ends on a planned basis rather than under pressure.
