Excellence Hall of Fame

John is the founder and CEO of Aerogen, Ireland’s largest indigenous MedTech company and a world leader in aerosolized drug delivery technology. He is a serial entrepreneur who has founded or co-founded several “blue ocean” technology start-ups, the last three of which have been in the life-science sector. A product and business innovator John is accredited with over twenty commercialized US and international patents ranging from robotics to life support ventilators.

John was born in London in 1959 to Irish parents who had emigrated from Galway in the west of Ireland. His father worked in construction and his mother as a nanny. The family maintained a strong connection to their Irish roots – John’s mother often reminded the family that ‘Home was Ireland’ and that they were ‘only visitors in England’ – and the children spent every summer in Galway.

John left school at 16 and initially trained as a Draftsman whilst also working on building sites at the weekends as he ‘liked to have money in his pocket.’ He continued his studies at night school and qualified as an Engineer in 1982, having studied Robotics and Advanced Automation at Chesterfield College.

As a Design Engineer in London, John worked in the petrochemical, automation, and aerospace industries. He met his future wife, Bernadette, on board a ship while travelling to Ireland for a rugby match and they got married in 1984. Having always desired to bring his family up in Ireland, when a joint venture business opportunity arose in 1990 to bring an aerospace project to the west of Ireland, he knew this was the opportunity that would bring him home. He relocated to Galway settling in Moycullen with Bernadette and their three children (they later went on to have another two children).

Unfortunately, the Irish Aerospace industry took a significant downturn in 1991 following the failed floatation of Tony Ryan’s GPA and funding for the joint venture dried up almost overnight so the project had to be abandoned. However, despite this major setback, John was determined to make the move to Galway work and so he undertook several engineering consultancy design projects including a turnkey design for water filtration and balancing system for irrigation tanks deployed in the ‘Great Man-made River’ project in Libya. Keen to use his design skills in the newly emerging MedTech industry in Ireland, he then took a role at Puritan Bennett (now Medtronic) in 1993. There, working on the design of a new ICU Excellence Hall of Fame Nominee – John Power 2

ventilator he gained knowledge of the MedTech industry, and in particular the respiratory sector. During this time, he identified an unmet need for effective aerosol drug delivery for mechanically ventilated patients. John recognized that although the global leaders in respiratory care continued to invest many tens of millions in the development of new ICU ventilators, none had addressed the effective delivery of aerosolized drugs for those ventilated patients. He felt that solving this critical problem was the opportunity he had been looking for to again start a new business so, in 1997, he founded Cerus Medical above a butcher’s shop in Moycullen. In 2000, it merged with US Bio-pharma company Aerogen Inc and John helped to take the company public on NASDAQ later that year. While working on the design and development of the new aerosol technology and product, he continued his studies, earning an Executive MBA from Oxford Brookes University in 2001.

In 2005, Aerogen Inc was acquired by Nektar Therapeutics in a hostile takeover. Worried about the loss of control of running the business and losing the emerging technology under development, John led a leveraged MBO of his Strategic Business Unit from Nektar in 2008. In his first year back in control of the business, Aerogen turned a profit and it has continued to grow every year since, effectively doubling its revenues every three years and today employing over 500 highly educated and skilled staff. Under John’s leadership Aerogen has grown to become the world leader in its field of development and commercialization of effective aerosol drug delivery for acutely and chronically ill patients. This entrepreneurial success did not go unnoticed and in 2015 John was named as The European Entrepreneur of The Year.

Under John’s leadership Aerogen has won numerous awards including the prestigious European Business Award Ruban d’Honneur (2011), Irish MedTech Company of the year (2013) and Irish Exporter of the Year (2014). On 10 occasions between 2013 and 2023, it received the Zenith Award (the highest award granted by the American Association of Respiratory Care) for ‘providing products and services that enable respiratory care physicians and therapists to achieve clinical excellence.’

Aerogen was at the forefront of the response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Its products were used worldwide to deliver aerosolized medication to over 5 million critically ill ventilated patients. The company also formed a Covid response unit to support projects researching potential treatments and partnered with CanSino Bio to create the world’s first inhaled Covid vaccine delivery system that was used to inoculate several million people. The ground-breaking technology increased immunization effectiveness and reduced the dose volume of vaccine required, enabling a greater number of people to be vaccinated at greatly lower cost.

In 2020, the company was once again the recipient of the Irish MedTech Company of the Year Award, followed by the Irish MedTech Association Covid-19 Response Recognition of the Year Award in 2021 for its critical role during the pandemic. In 2022, the company was named ‘Technology Exporter of the Year’ at the Asia Business Matters Awards, again in recognition of the unique role its technology had played during the crisis.

In 2016, Aerogen established its Specialty Pharmaceutics division, Aerogen Pharma, with the objective of bringing own brand Drug/Device Combination products to market. Utilizing Aerogen’s next-generation aerosol delivery platform, its lead product AeroFactTM is an investigational, biologic/device combination product, poised to deliver a ground-breaking advance in the treatment of respiratory distress syndrome Excellence Hall of Fame Nominee – John Power 3

(RDS) in premature infants enabling for the first time in medical practice the trans-nasal pulmonary delivery of surfactant replacement therapy. Building out its pharmaceutics pipeline in 2023 Aerogen announced a partnership with the Gates Foundation for the clinical development of an aerosolized synthetic surfactant product.

Today, with offices in Europe, America, the Middle East, and Asia, Aerogen is recognized as a global brand leader in the Acute Care sector. Its award-winning products have been used to treat over 20 million critically ill patients in more than 80 countries around the world. Aerogen continues its pioneering work partnering with global pharmaceutical leaders and developing future solutions for the safe and effective delivery of novel inhaled therapies whilst also funding its own emerging specialty pharmaceutics business.

John is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Galway where he guest lectures on his core business interests of innovation strategies and technology entrepreneurship. He is a founder faculty member of the University Bio-Innovate program (run in conjunction with Stanford University Bio-Design), an incubator unit that promotes entrepreneurial start-ups in medical technologies where he has actively mentored several early-stage companies. In 2016, his personal contribution to the development of the Irish Medical Device sector was recognized when he was conferred with an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Galway.

John is Chairman of Connacht Rugby Football Club, a Board member of Moycullen Community Development Association, a founder committee member of Connemara Greenway Alliance, and an industry representative on the University of Galway Sports Committee. He is a former Board member of The Irish Med-tech Association and the Irish Research Council for Science Engineering Technology.

John is an active supporter of many Irish and international charities and later this year will travel to Somalia for the official opening of a local hospital whose construction he funded in partnership with Trócaire.