We are in the midst of a digital transformation across society that brings opportunities and challenges. What used to work isn’t good enough anymore in a world that is increasingly becoming digital.

Through his small company Transform.Health as a vehicle, Lucien operates at the convergence of Innovation & Strategy for executive boards, governments, corporates, and professionals via his role as Edge Fellow for the Deloitte Center for the Edge (Amsterdam, Melbourne and San Francisco), at Exponential Medicine (since 2011) at Singularity University in Silicon Valley, the Netherlands as well as currently in the Nordics.

Dr. Rudi Pauwels is a scientist and serial bio-tech entrepreneur (pharmaceuticals & diagnostics).

He started at the Rega Institute (Belgium) where he described in the mid-eighties the first methods to search for anti-HIV drugs. His work led to several new anti-HIV compounds including the discovery in 1988 of the nucleotide class of HIV RT inhibitors (e.g. adefovir, tenofovir) and in 1990 the first description of the NNRTI-class of compounds. He (co)-founded several companies in the field of anti-HIV treatment (Tibotec) and diagnostics (Virco, drug resistance testing). The R&D efforts at Tibotec would lead to three next generation anti-HIV drugs: the protease inhibitor darunavir (PREZISTA™), the NNRTI’s etravirine (INTELENCE™) and rilpivirine (EDURANT™). In 1999, he was the driving force behind the creation of Tibotec-Crucell joint-spin off Galapagos Genomics. He headed for a few years the anti-infective (HIV, HCV, TB) drug discovery efforts of Johnson & Johnson. In 2004 Dr. Pauwels went on a 3-year sabbatical at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology EPFL to deepen his knowledge in micro- and nanotechnology. Driven by the increasing need for more rapid and easy-to-use diagnostics to enable personalized medicine in closer proximity of the patients, he founded Biocartis in 2007.

After leading the company for nearly a decade, he decided in 2017 to focus again on infectious diseases and technology innovation. Inspired by his experiences in West Africa during the Ebola outbreak, he created the Praesens Foundation that is developing, providing and implementing easy to train and use solutions that contribute to better epidemic preparedness, early warning and rapid response for existing and emerging infectious diseases and medicine in general.

Andre Hoekema is Chief Business Officer at Galapagos, responsible for M&A, licensing and IP. He joined Galapagos early 2005 from Invitrogen, where he was Managing Director of Corp Dev Europe. He has 30 years of biotech experience from positions at Crucell, DSM/Gist-brocades, Syngenta MOGEN and Genentech.

Dr. Hoekema has a PhD degree from Leiden University and is the inventor of over 20 series of patents. Over the years at Galapagos, he executed the pharma partnering strategy, including the deals with Servier, AbbVie, Novartis and Gilead.

Robert is an experienced global program and team leader with passion for innovation, strategy, social impact and change leadership.

He currently holds a double role as Head of Sustainability and Chief of Staff Innovation & Strategy at Royal Philips.

As Head of Sustainability, Robert has been driving the company strategy towards innovative, sustainable business models. In particular, Robert and his team are leading the Healthy People, Sustainable Planet program (https://www.philips.com/a-w/about/sustainability/our-approach/ambition-2020), which embeds sustainability thinking across all sectors of the company.

In his role as Chief of Staff, he is responsible for initiating and driving strategic initiatives across Innovation, Strategy, Design, IP&S, and Sustainability.

Before joining Philips, Robert worked at McKinsey & Company as consultant where he gained 5 years of experience in strategy and innovation in the high-tech, health-care and public sectors.

Dr. Edwin Moses is a serial entrepreneur in life science companies. As CEO, he built two businesses (Oxford Asymmetry International plc and Ablynx nv), led their successful IPOs on the LSE, EuroNext and NASDAQ and raised over €500M in equity and debt financing.

He ran the sales process for each company generating values of £316M and €3.9Bn respectively. At Ablynx, Edwin ensured that the novel Nanobody technology platform was used to build a broad product pipeline, including Cablivi™ which was recently approved for use in both Europe and the USA. In addition, he helped secure pharmaceutical collaborations with a potential value of >€10Bn. Edwin has expertise in high value service provision to the pharmaceutical industry and in drug discovery and development, with more than 25 years of Board level experience in >15 companies. He is currently Chairman of Achilles Therapeutics, Evox Therapeutics and Virion Biotherapeutics.

Geraldine O’Keeffe joined LSP in 2008. She became a Partner of the firm in 2010. Geraldine’s prime focus and responsibility within LSP is to invest in listed securities.

Prior to joining LSP, she held the position of Senior Healthcare Analyst at Fortis Investment Banking. In that position, she researched a wide range of innovative life sciences companies, both in Europe and the US. Geraldine brings strong analytical and investment skills to the LSP team. Before joining the financial community, she worked within the life sciences industry for a number of years, gaining first-hand product development experience in a commercial setting. Prior to working in the industry, she lectured in Biomedical Sciences for several years at the Dublin Institute of Technology. Geraldine has a very strong scientific background, including a Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry and Microbiology from University College Cork and a Master’s degree in Biotechnology from University College Galway. She also conducted post-graduate research, inter alia at the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany. In addition, Geraldine is also a graduate of The Dublin School of Business.

Mark-Jan is CEO and co-founder of Aidence. He began his path to founding Aidence more than 20 years ago after completing a masters in Computer Science at the Technical University Eindhoven. This path then led him to occupy various roles in software including IT architecture in finance, founding and exiting a consumer software company and machine learning consultancy.

Why Mark-Jan is excited about applying AI to the healthcare industry: “AI is fascinating because you can build something that is better at a given task than you are yourself. That allows humanity to bootstrap itself and achieve things that were unimaginable until very recently. In healthcare especially there is a huge opportunity to apply this power for the benefit of all.”

Jan De Kerpel is a seasoned biotech/healthcare business and finance expert with more than 20 years of combined experience in the fields of drug development, equity and growth financing.

Jan brings a unique blend of business, scientific and financial knowledge to enhance the development of high-growth life science companies. He has a proven track record in successfully identifying investment opportunities to a continuously expanding international investor basis and have been instrumental in raising €Bns in equity financing for numerous European biotech, medtech, diagnostics, health services and pharmaceutical companies.

Prior to Kempen, he was a senior equity analist at KBC Securities responsible for the biotech/healthcare sector in the Benelux. Before turning to the investment banking world, he was an R&D director at Devgen (now Syngenta) and senior scientist at Tibotec-Virco (now JNJ), involved in drug development and project-, team-, and business development. His team-work resulted in several commercial products, not only creating shareholder value, but having a life-saving impact for many people around the world.

Academically: master and PhD in life sciences (KULeuven, Belgium), postgraduate in Business Administration (KULeuven) and an executive MBA (Vlerick Business School), corporate finance classes (KUBrussel).

Michaël holds a double position of VP Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer at Mithra Pharmaceuticals, a biotech company focusing on Women Health.

He has gained a vast experience in healthcare through various corporate and legal positions. Before joining Mithra Michaël worked for Terumo, a Japanese stock listed medtech and pharma company. He initiated his career as a lawyer, where he developed a legal practice focusing on corporate and commercial advisory towards both private and institutional clients in the life sciences industry.

Michaël holds law degrees (LL.M.) in both health law and in business law (University of Antwerp and Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London), as well as a degree in business (Solvay Business School) and corporate finance (Saïd Business School, University of Oxford) .

Dr. Cedric Ververken joined Confo Therapeutics as CEO in October 2016 from Ablynx NV where he was Vice President Business Development and played a key role in landmark deals for Ablynx.

Prior to moving to business development he worked through various R&D functions at Ablynx, first as a scientist in the pharmacology group and later as project manager, leading cross-functional project teams from discovery up to clinical studies. He therefore brings over 12 years of R&D and business development experience to valorise Confo Therapeutics’ assets and technology.

With the CFA charter and a Ph.D. in chemistry Servaas Michielssens has a dual background in finance and science.

He graduated from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and obtained his PhD from the same university. He continued his academic career as a researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. In 2016 he joined Candriam as a senior analyst and at present he is co-manager of the Candriam Biotechnology and Oncology Impact strategy with in total over $2 Billion assets under management.

With a background in oncology and immunology, Dr. Brichard’s work has been focused since 1986 on the appealing project of educating our natural defenses – those that protect us from infectious diseases – to recognize and kill cancer cells.

He holds an M.D., a specialized master’s degree in Internal Medicine and Oncology, and a Ph.D. from Louvain University, Brussels. He further holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

Dr. Brichard participated actively in the pioneering work done at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (Brussels Branch), under the leadership of Thierry Boon, where he identified several tumor antigens and started the first trials in humans with MAGE antigens. He spent several years at the Institut Curie (Paris), one of Europe’s best-known cancer centers, where he set up a cancer immunotherapy platform. In 2002 he joined GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals, where he was Senior Vice-President and had responsibility for the Immunotherapeutics Business Unit, which covered a broad, integrated approach to immunotherapy – from bench discovery through clinical development and operations to regulatory and commercial activities. In addition to this position, he served as a member of the Board of Directors at GSK Biologicals (annual sales ca. £ 3.5 bn). Based on his experience, translated by more than 90 primary research publications and reviews, he decided to set up his own consulting firm, ViaNova, aiming to provide support to companies, organizations, institutions and individuals in the fields of immuno-oncology and vaccines. Vincent is Venture Partner with LSP since 2016, active mainly in the LSP 5 and 6 funds. In 2019, Vincent founded Paracrine Biologicals, a company based on the pioneering exosomes technology from A*Star in Singapore for therapeutic uses and is setting up with other industry veterans, biotech founders and fund managers a Seed Fund, with the objective to support actively portfolio companies through a presence on the shopfloor.

Sachin is the co-founder and Fund Manager of Third Eye Healthcare Fund. Third Eye is an open ended long-biased long/short global healthcare investment fund.

The Fund’s objective is to generate long-term returns for investors by investing in carefully selected publicly listed healthcare companies. The Fund’s performance should come primarily from long positions, with short positions providing protection in the event of market corrections. The Fund maintains up to 50% exposure to European Healthcare. Prior to incorporating Third Eye in 2016, Sachin worked as Director and Head of the Life Sciences team in the securities division of Kempen & Co, a merchant bank in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. During his eight years at Kempen & Co from 2008 to 2016, he led a team of five, was responsible for coverage of the European Healthcare and Life Sciences sector and won Extel and StarMine awards for stock picking. He has over fifteen years of experience in life sciences, with an exposure to both private (Venture Capital) as well as public market investments, and has been involved in multiple IPOs and secondary transactions, raising over €1.0bn for various life sciences companies.

Marisa was appointed in March 2015 at the Agency as Senior Scientific Advisor in the Research and Development Division and since 1st September 2016 moved in to the advisory function of Scientific Committees Regulatory Science strategy.

In her new position Marisa has two main assignments:

Co-chair of the EU Innovation offices Network comprising 24 Innovation Offices across the EU competent authorities with focus on the strengthening the overall EU regulatory support to innovation in therapies science and technologies.

Contribute to the establishment of the EMA Regulatory Science Observatory (RSO) and the drafting of the EMA Regulatory Science Strategy to 2025. The RSO is a matrix function with strong internal, EU and international outreach, aiming at informing strategies for both the support of medicines successful development and modernisation of regulatory tools for the benefit of individuals, public health and society at large.

Marisa kept over the years a close link with academic life:  she has a position of contract professor and lecturer at the University of Rome Tor Vergata (Italy), contributed lectures to a Master and an International Public Health conference at Imperial College (UK) and has been involved in a number of activities in collaboration with European Commission DG R&I Health at the forefront of Next Gen Medicines, clinical nanotechnology applications and Patient Centred Medicine.

Geert-Jan Mulder, MD, is a Managing Partner at Forbion, co-founded the fund in 2006 and currently serves on the Board of several Forbion portfolio companies.

In addition, Geert-Jan led the firm’s successful investment in bluebirdbio (NASDAQ: BLUE), which went public in 2013, where he supported the company in clinical development and served as the chairman for several years. Other investments include Acorda Therapeutics (NASDAQ:ACOR), which went public in 2006 where he was part of the AMPYRA®(dalfampridine) board panel to evaluate a new regulatory endpoint in Multiple Sclerosis; PanGenetics B.V. which sold to Abbott, where he led the Series B financing round; Transave, where supported the company’s clinical development for ARIKAYCE®(liposomal amikacin for inhalation) partly as interim CMO, he also served on the Board of Directors till the merger with Insmed (NASDAQ:INSM) in 2010; and Exosome Diagnostics, the leading liquid biopsy company spun out of MGH, where he led the Series A and C, and a director worked together with management to position the company for its successful acquisition by Bio-Techne (NASDAQ:TECH) in 2018. In addition he is a co-author of several Forbion and Forbion portfolio related scientific publications.
Prior to joining ABN AMRO Capital Life Sciences (Forbion’s predecessor) in 2001, Geert-Jan spent two years as resident in OBGYN at the University Medical Center of Utrecht (UMC) and several years in the pharmaceutical industry in clinical development and global medical marketing for both Searle (now Pfizer) and Byk Gulden (now Takeda).

“Fiona de Hemptinne joined in March 2018, UCB Ventures, a €150 million strategic corporate venture fund which was set up to invest in innovative, longer term and higher risk opportunities beyond UCB’s current focus areas.

She is a board director at Medifin, a medical Imaging start-up since 2015 and at the financiere de Tubize since 2014. She is on the governors’ body at the London Business School since 2015 and a member of their audit and risk committee.

Fiona joined UCB in 2014 in the development bone team as Bone commercial lead based in Slough and as Head of Europe for the Bone Patient Value Unit built the European country teams to prepare the launch of UCB-Amgen’s anti-sclerostin, EVENITY.

She started her career in 2001 and worked in Business Development for GlaxoSmithKline, Biologicals, in Belgium. In 2002, she moved to the US and worked at McKinsey & Company, based in their New Jersey office, covering healthcare clients in the US and Europe. From 2006 to 2014, she had several leadership roles at Lilly UK, Northern Hub and Europe contributing to the launches, new indications and relaunches of several drugs across different therapeutic areas (Neurology, Cardiovascular, Osteoporosis and Immunology), working with alliance partners (BI, Daiichi Sankyo, J&J and GSK), managing patient support programs and leading changes through patent exclusivities and new models.

Fiona graduated with a MSc. in Management degree at the Solvay Business School (U.L.B) and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She is a Fulbright Scholar and a Recipient of Belgian American Education Foundation (BAEF) scholarship.

She is Belgian, lives in London with her husband and her four children.”

Starting in 2012, Lieke has been driving the global change towards a circular economy by bringing the innovative concept of sharing to the healthcare sector. She co-founded FLOOW2 Healthcare, the first sharing marketplace for healthcare organizations to share equipment, services, facilities, knowledge and skills within or between organizations.

Lieke has a professional background in healthcare. She studied medicine and has been working in several managerial and organizational positions in healthcare organizations in The Netherlands and abroad for 10 years. She experienced first-hand how much organizations can benefit from sharing their assets, in the first place financially, but certainly also socially and environmentally.

Being involved in the transition to a circular economy from the early beginning she has developed a strong vision on why this is taking place at this moment in time, and how it influences our evolution as humans and the organizations we work in.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liekevankerkhoven/

Berthold A. Hummel is a partner in the Munich office of Baker McKenzie. Berthold has more than 20 years in-depth industry knowledge in private equity and venture capital from private practice and as a senior legal counsel of a leading international private equity firm. Berthold advises European technology and biotech companies on their successful US-IPOs at NASDAQ and NYSE.

Berthold focuses on M&A, private equity, growth capital, venture capital and equity capital markets transactions in advising strategic clients, institutional investors, financial sponsors, large multi-family offices, management teams and companies backed by financial sponsors and institutional investors. He handles all types of complex corporate and commercial transactions, including cross-border acquisitions, financing rounds, takeovers and capital market matters, as well as corporate restructurings, compliance and corporate commercial matters.

Berthold is consistently recommended by leading independent directories, including Chambers, JUVE and Legal 500 and is described as “dedicated to doing a perfect job, and having a very strong commercial and structural sense” as well as “being pragmatic, focused on the essentials, well organized and always available at a late hour.” Best Lawyers in Germany 2019, published by Handelsblatt, listed him among the leading lawyers in the area of private equity.

Anne-Sophie Bricca is Deputy General Counsel at Terumo BCT, a global leader in blood components and cellular technologies, member of the Terumo group. With her team, she provides legal and compliance support to Terumo BCT sales entities in EMEA.

She is a member of Terumo BCT Executive Leadership Team. She represents Terumo group at MedTech Europe (the European association of the medical devices and diagnostic industry) and since January 2019, she assumes the Chair of the Ethics and Compliance Group and seats at the Code Committee. Since October 2016, she is also member of the Strategic Committee of ETHICS (International Society of Healthcare Ethics and Compliance) and a member of its Board since October 2018.

Before joining Terumo BCT in 2009, Anne-Sophie Bricca worked as in-house counsel for the IT industry during 10 years (HP, CPG International, Ingram Micro). She also worked as a general counsel for Franco Dragone Entertainment Group for the design and making of the show “The House of Dancing Water” in Macao.

Anne-Sophie holds two post graduates degrees in European Laws from the University Robert Schuman (Strasbourg) and in International Laws from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Brussels). She was the laureate of the international Rousseau Competition in International Laws chaired by Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1997.

Nathalie ter Wengel, a medical doctor, is the European Lead Worldwide Business Development at Pfizer, where she is responsible for establishing new collaborations and exploring licensing and other corporate development opportunities across all therapeutic areas.

Previous to this role, she was the European Head for External Science & Innovation. Nathalie has an international background and a broad knowledge in the medical field, having worked in the hospital with extensive experience in internal medicine. Nathalie started her commercial career as European Medical Manager at Pfizer, where she successfully led ambitious international projects, combining a business perspective with her medical knowledge. It was this experience, coupled with her father’s illness that convinced her of the urgent need for change in the pharmaceutical industry. Consequently, she started up a company called myTomorrows focused on compassionate use, and served as Chief Medical Officer before joining Galapagos as Business Development Director, where she played a key role in the very successful NASDAQ IPO and in partnering filgotinib.

Hiroshi Sheraton’s practice covers all aspects of intellectual property law with a particular emphasis on contentious patent and trade mark matters and life sciences. Much of his work is cross-border in nature.

He regularly co-ordinates pan-European and global IP litigation and advises clients on international IP strategies for patent litigation and brand protection. He represents clients in the UKIPO, EPO, OHIM, the English Courts and the CJEU. He has experience of IP matters across Europe and has litigated IP cases in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Ireland, Northern Ireland and Luxembourg, the USA and Asia Pacific.  Although he has a first degree in biochemistry and molecular biology, he covers all areas of technology from pharmaceuticals/biotech products and agrochemicals to electronics and software.

Dr. Jacco Keja is Global Category Leader HEOR and HTA, Real World-Evidence Solutions at IQVIA, drawing on deep expertise in database driven studies for market access, drug safety, health economics and classical outcomes research.

Jacco’ s background includes four years as global head of pricing, reimbursement, health outcomes and market access consulting services at a large clinical research organization and more than 13 years experience in the pharmaceutical industry, including senior-level international and global roles in sales management, strategic marketing, pricing and reimbursement and health economics.
Jacco holds a PhD in Biophysics (Neurophysiology) from Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, a Masters in Medical Biology, and an undergraduate degree in Biology, both from Utrecht University. He was also visiting Professor in marketing management and access at the Institute of Health Policy & Management at Erasmus University for 10 years up to 2018.

Martine is an M&A lawyer (Netherlands/England & Wales) with a strong focus on the healthcare sector, having assisted a large number of pharma, biotech and medtech companies and investors in multi-jurisdictional deals. She is passionate about sustainability and actively promotes ‘less-waste’ living.

Martine is the initiator of Hot in Healthcare: “The needs of our life sciences clients have changed. Having a thorough understanding of their business, and insight in political and social developments that could affect it, has become more important than ever. Listening to the needs of our clients brought the idea of Hot in Healthcare to life“.

Oliver Bisazza, MedTech Europe Director of Regulations & Industrial Policy. Oliver leads the MedTech Europe regulatory team, which supports its industry members in their implementation of the new EU IVD and medical devices regulations.

Within this team, Oliver’s personal role is to represent MedTech Europe and communicate its positions the EU authorities and other stakeholders. Prior to joining MedTech Europe in 2017, he worked at Medtronic as Director of Regulatory Policy for EMEA.
In addition to this company experience, Oliver has had trade association roles in Brussels, at COCIR (the European association for the radiological, electromedical and healthcare IT industries) and at EDANA (the industry association for the nonwovens and related industries).

Oliver is a native speaker of English, and a dual national of Australia and Malta.

Robert Abbott currently serves as VP, Chief Legal Counsel for EMEA at Stryker. Stryker is one of the world’s leading medical technology companies, and offers innovative products and services in Orthopaedics, Medical and Surgical, as well as Neurotechnology and Spine.

Robert has a successful track record as a strategic contributor to global leadership teams, and as a leader of legal functions at regional and global scales. Having worked not only in the MedTech industry but also in the semi-conductor and High Energy Physics domains, he seeks to leverage his experiences and insights from high-tech to better understand the transformative nature of digital health.

Bart Delbaere is senior marketing analyst biotech/healthcare at Kempen Securities and has 15 years of experience in this field.  Bart has an extensive international network of institutional investors and Family Offices from Scandinavia to France and the Benelux who invest in life sciences companies and was involved in successfully raising capital in IPO’s and equity transactions.

Prior to Kempen, he was senior wealth manager at ABN AMRO and UBS.  Before that Bart worked for more than 10 years as senior institutional sales at KBC Securities and also involved in IPO’s and capital raisings of life sciences companies.

Academically: MBA (University of Antwerp), Master in Accountancy & Finance (University Brussels), Degree in Portfolio Management (Brussels), Master in History (University Ghent).

Bart van Straten is General Manager at Van Straten Medical, teacher for medical professions and researcher at TU Delft in the field of the Circular Economy, in particular Circular Instrument Management.

Bart is actively involved in the development of a multitude of medical devices that are currently used worldwide and is considered as one of the founders of the concept of sustainable health care by means of circularity with surgical instruments.

Together with Tim Horeman, Delft University of Technology, department of BioMechanical Engineering, he conducts research in the field of sustainable surgery and circular instrument management. Tim and Bart are often heard as duo speakers on the topic of sustainable surgery and circular reprocessing of medical materials.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bartvanstraten/

www.vanstratenmedical.com

Dr. De Vries is responsible for the overall management of the Company. Dr. De Vries has extensive senior level experience in both the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry. He joined Pharming from Switzerland-based 4-Antibody where he was CEO.

Dr. De Vries has also been CEO of Morphochem AG and prior to this he worked at Novartis Pharma and Novartis Ophthalmics and at SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals Plc where he held senior business and commercial positions. Dr. De Vries holds an MD degree from the University of Amsterdam and a MBA in General Management from Ashridge Management College (UK)

Els Janssens just rejoined Baker Mckenzie’s healthcare practice in Brussels as counsel. Before that she was based in the firm’s Abu Dhabi office working for healthcare clients across the MENA region where she continues to be involved.

Els has built a strong profile and expertise in healthcare having worked six years in London as a legal adviser with the European Medicines Agency (EMA). She also worked as senior legal counsel in Johnson & Johnson’s European legal department providing regulatory advice regarding various medicinal products and supporting the public affairs function on new legislation.

Dr. Jaap Bonjer (1960) is Professor of Surgery and Chair of the Department of Surgery at the Amsterdam University Medical Centre, the Netherlands. Surgical innovation, clinical research and education are his main fields of interest.

In 2000, Dr. Bonjer was awarded a Chair in Endoscopic Surgery at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He developed a multidisciplinary simulation facility, the Skills Lab Erasmus MC, in Rotterdam in 2004.

Dr. Bonjer was Professor of Surgery at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, from 2004 until 2009 and served as Chair of the Dalhousie and Capital Health Department of Surgery from 2006 through 2009. He initiated the Nova Scotia Surgical Network and founded in 2007 an inter-professional learning environment, the Skills Centre for Health Sciences, in Halifax.

Dr. Bonjer is founder and CEO of the Amsterdam Skills Centre (ASC) for Health Sciences which will is operational since January 2019. The ASC will train more than 3,000 health care professionals per year. The ASC develops in collaboration with international partners a New Way of Learning; a scalable, digital and mobile learning environment enabling a shortened and sustainable curriculum for health care professionals worldwide.

Dr. Bonjer completed a Health-MBA program at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam in 2014. He is Associate Editor of Surgical Endoscopy, President of the European Association of Endoscopic Surgery (2017 – 2019), President Elect of the Dutch Society of Surgery and Commander at the Royal Dutch Navy Reserves

Dr. Bonjer is initiator and principal investigator of the COLOR, COLOR II and COLOR III trials in patients with colorectal cancer. Centres throughout Europe, North America and Asia participate in these trials. Dr. Bonjer has published more than 260 peer reviewed scientific manuscripts (h-index 52) and edited five surgical textbooks.

Wieteke Wouters is programme director of HollandBIO, the Dutch biotech industry association. HollandBIO unites and supports a growing member base of over 200 companies in their ambitions to deliver biotech innovations that contribute to our society’s health, sustainability and economic growth.

Prior to joining HollandBIO, Wieteke was responsible for the Life Sciences & Health activities of consultancy firm Schuttelaar & Partners, working for many different stakeholders in the biotech sector. Wieteke began her career in various roles at genomics service provider ServiceXS (now Genomescan). Wieteke graduated in Biomedical Sciences at Utrecht University and specialized in Science and Business Management.