Fred Dom is a serial entrepreneur with expertise in private capital investment, setting up and leading biotech companies. Today he is managing director and co-founder of HiFiBiO SAS, a clinical stage biotech company that raised over $ 200 million to advance a pipeline of therapeutic antibodies making use of the power of droplet based microfluidics. Fred also co-founded BioMillenia (Paris) that merged with Design Pharmaceuticals and holds board positions in Calyxia and Kapsera (micro encapsulation companies based in France). Fred is a member of the Dutch Advisory Board of life science and health” and AcTi (Academy of Technology and Innovation). Fred holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Dirk is co-founder of DESIGN PHARMACEUTICALS and BIOMILLENIA. He brings more than 25 years of experience in product development and commercialisation in the Life Sciences industry. After obtaining his Ph.D. in immunology from the University of Cologne, Germany, Dirk joined QIAGEN, a global leader in Life Sciences and Molecular Diagnostics products where he held the positions at the German headquarter as VP, Global head of Product Development Life Sciences and as VP Research of Molecular Diagnostics in the US. He has a proven track record in building high growth profitable product portfolios with >€660 mio organic revenues (1998-2019). He has authored numerous patents and brings experience from having internationally managed product development teams and programs including integration of acquired businesses.

Dirk is co-founder of DESIGN PHARMACEUTICALS and BIOMILLENIA. He brings more than 25 years of experience in product development and commercialisation in the Life Sciences industry. After obtaining his Ph.D. in immunology from the University of Cologne, Germany, Dirk joined QIAGEN, a global leader in Life Sciences and Molecular Diagnostics products where he held the positions at the German headquarter as VP, Global head of Product Development Life Sciences and as VP Research of Molecular Diagnostics in the US. He has a proven track record in building high growth profitable product portfolios with >€660 mio organic revenues (1998-2019). He has authored numerous patents and brings experience from having internationally managed product development teams and programs including integration of acquired businesses.

Maxence has extensive experience in international business development in the healthcare sector. He brings over 10-year experience in pharma BD, including sales of finished products (drugs, medical devices), sales of CDMO services and licensing of Intellectual Property. Aside from his core BD skills he has gained  valuable regulatory, product development and GMP manufacturing insights over his years of experience in pharma.

Xinhao Ye is a pharmaceutical expert with more than 10 years of experience in biologics process development. During this period, Dr. Ye developed expertise in lab-scale to commercial-scale process development, cell-free protein synthesis/cell-free enzymatic synthesis, and high-throughput protein engineering. He has filed multiple INDs both in the US (FDA) and China (NMPA). Prior to his role at Hutchinson MediPharma, Dr. Ye worked at the Pfizer Vaccine Research Unit for 8 years and played key roles in various drug process development to advance clinical studies. Ye has published 15 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters with over 900 total citatons up to date.

Guansheng studied chemistry at Zhejiang University, China. He then obtained a joint PhD from Zhejiang University, China, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands and  Philips Research on the topic of microfluidic platforms for cell analysis and high throughput screening. Guansheng joined Biomillenia, the French subsidiary of Design Pharmaceuticals leading the technology development for microfluidics engineering and ultrahigh-throughput screening after his Postdoc at École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles (ESPCI, ParisTech) in Paris, France.

Alex has more than 10 years research and project management experience in microbiology after obtaining his PhD in Microbiology at the University of Kansas Medical Center in  Kansas City, USA. His research projects were funded twice by the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO, Heidelberg, Germany) and he conducted microbiology  research at several high impact international institutions such as at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Medicale (INSERM) and Institut National de la Recherche  Agronomique (INRA) in Paris, France as well as at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and at University of California in Irvine, USA. He obtaind a degree at the medical school of  Université Paris Diderot in Paris for a diploma to become a chief investigator for clinical trials. He leads the microbiology research and high-throughput screening discovery activities at Design Pharma, France.

John Hastewell is a biochemist by training, B.A (Oxon), D.Phil. (Ebor), After researching gastrointestinal absorption of pyrimidines, he joined Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis) in 1989, working across research and early development. He moved to Cambridge MA,  in 2003, as Head of the Program Office to help create the strategy and build the new NIBR Institutes for Biomedical Sciences, becoming head of the NIBR Biologics Center. In this role he supported the development of the required technologies for all non small molecule therapeutics (antibodies, protein and nucleic acid based). Ultimately as head of Research Cambridge was responsible for preclinical sciences, research analytics, imaging, drug discovery technologies and several Disease Areas. He retired from Novartis in 2018.

Robert Nicol is the Director of Technology Development at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Robert's research group develops tools to engineer biology across three core areas: massively parallel DNA synthesis, biomolecule library generation, and ultra-high throughput methods to screen these libraries for machine learning. These tools require integration of systems engineering, microfluidics, semiconductors, synthetic biology, and sequencing.  Robert has been an Investigator on multiple large scale advanced biotechnology development programs for DARPA, IARPA, and NIH. Robert is also the co-founder of multiple biotechnology companies focused on applying these tools to create advanced therapeutics for the benefit of patients. 

Cosmas is a physician-scientist with experiences across large pharma, entrepreneurship and venture capital.  Cosmas was a Director at Takeda Pharmaceuticals where he was responsible for developing partnerships and platforms on emerging technologies, along with leading drug development teams in cell and gene therapies. As a serial entrepreneur he is also a co-founder of Circ Bio, Inc  harnessing circular RNAs for genetic medicines. He is currently an entrepreneur in residence at Third Rock Ventures helping to create several NewCos. Previously, Cosmas was a faculty at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), where he headed a lab in RNA biology/epigenetics and maintained an active clinical practice. Cosmas’s academic research has been published in Cell, Science and Nature. Cosmas studied physics at MIT with training in internal medicine residency at Yale and gastroenterology at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School.

Andrew Griffiths is the director of the Laboratoire de Biochimie at ESPCI Paris PSL. While working with Greg Winter at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), Cambridge, he developed phage-display for the selection of human antibodies for therapy. This led to the creation of Cambridge Antibody Technology and Domantis and to the World’s top selling drug Humira®, and to the award of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2018 to Greg Winter. He then developed selection, high-throughput screening and directed evolution based on in vitro compartmentalisation (IVC) of reactions in aqueous microdroplets in water-in-oil emulsions. He has also pioneered the use of droplet-based microfluidic systems for both fundamental and applied research, including to investigate the origin of life, for high-throughput screening based on cellular phenotyping (e.g., for antibody discovery and directed evolution of enzymes), and for single-cell transcriptomic and epigenomic analysis. This work has led to the creation of five start-ups, RainDance Technologies (acquired by BioRad), HiFiBiO Therapetics, Biomillenia (merged with Design Pharmaceuticals), Cyprio and Minos Biosciences.

Robert Nicol is the Director of Technology Development at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Robert's research group develops tools to engineer biology across three core areas: massively parallel DNA synthesis, biomolecule library generation, and ultra-high throughput methods to screen these libraries for machine learning. These tools require integration of systems engineering, microfluidics, semiconductors, synthetic biology, and sequencing.  Robert has been an Investigator on multiple large scale advanced biotechnology development programs for DARPA, IARPA, and NIH. Robert is also the co-founder of multiple biotechnology companies focused on applying these tools to create advanced therapeutics for the benefit of patients. 

Michael Jewett is the Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence, the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, and Director of the Center for Synthetic Biology at Northwestern University. Dr. Jewett received his PhD in 2005 at Stanford University, completed postdoctoral studies at the Center for Microbial Biotechnology in Denmark and the Harvard Medical School, and was a guest professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich). He is the recipient of the NIH Pathway to Independence Award, David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, Camille-Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, and a Finalist for the Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists, among others. Jewett is a Fellow of AIMBE, AAAS, and NAI.

Marnix Medema is an Assistant Professor of Bioinformatics at Wageningen University. His research group develops and applies algorithms for the (meta)genomic identification and functional prediction of microbial biosynthetic pathways, with the aim to unravel the chemical language of microbiomes. He built and co-coordinates the development of the antiSMASH software for identification of biosynthetic gene clusters and developed various additional algorithms to chart their diversity and identify their functional roles in microbiomes. Medema is recipient of NWO Rubicon and Veni fellowships and an ERC Starting Grant, and has coordinated several international consortia studying bacterial specialized metabolites. He received several prizes for his work, including the NBIC Young Investigator Award. He is editorial board member of Natural Product Reports, mSystems and FEMS Microbes, senior editor of ISME Communications, and member of the scientific advisory board of Hexagon Bio. From 2020-2022, he also serves as Van der Klaauw visiting professor of theoretical biology at Leiden University.

Noah W. Palm is an Assistant Professor of Immunobiology at Yale University School of Medicine, where his lab focuses on understanding how the trillions of microbes that live in and on us (our microbiota) interact with and influence their mammalian hosts. His work particularly emphasizes the development of new technologies to deconvolute complex host-microbiota interactions and reveal causal roles for the microbiota in human health and disease. Dr. Palm received his B.A. in Biology from Macalester College and performed doctoral work with Dr. Ruslan Medzhitov and postdoctoral work with Dr. Richard Flavell at Yale University. He is the recipient of multiple honors and awards, including the Smith Family Foundation Award for Excellence in Biomedical Research, Pew Biomedical Scholar Award, and NIH Director's New Innovator Award.

Dirk is co-founder of DESIGN PHARMACEUTICALS and BIOMILLENIA. He brings  more than 25 years of experience in product development and commercialisation in the Life Sciences industry. After obtaining his Ph.D. in immunology from the University of Cologne, Germany, Dirk joined QIAGEN, a global leader in Life Sciences and Molecular Diagnostics products where he held the positions at the German headquarter as VP, Global head of Product Development Life Sciences and as VP Research of Molecular Diagnostics in the US. He has a proven track record in building high growth profitable product portfolios with >€660 mio organic revenues (1998-2019). He has authored numerous patents and brings experience from having internationally managed product development teams and programs including integration of acquired businesses

Dr. Tianhong Xu is a founding partner of Virtus Inspire Ventures. Dr. Xu's life science experience spanned over 15 years as a venture capitalist, UN officer, entrepreneur, research and clinical doctor. He focuses on investments in the medical device, biotech, and healthcare service space. He was a Partner at WI Group and Vangoo Capital, responsible for MedTech investment. Previously, he was a Medical Industry Expert for the United Nations-Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), where he directed the upgrade of medical industrial clusters in China through investment promotion, technology transfer, and management consulting. He was co-founder of two gene diagnosis and personalized medicine companies. Prior to that, he was a surgeon at Renji Hospital in China. He earned his Ph.D. in Molecular and Human Genetics from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and MD from Fudan University, Shanghai, China.