Nard Clabbers
Kushal Vora
Naveen Jain
Naveen Jain is an entrepreneur driven to solve the world’s biggest challenges through innovation. He is the founder of several successful companies including Moon Express, Viome, Bluedot, TalentWise, Intelius and InfoSpace.
Moon Express is the only company to have permission from the US government to leave earth orbit and land on the moon with the goal to harvest planetary resources and to develop infrastructure to make humanity a multi-planetary society.
Viome is focused on disrupting healthcare with the goal of “making illness elective” by identifying microbial biomarkers that are predictive of chronic diseases and to adjust the microbial imbalance through personalized nutrition.
Naveen Jain a trustee of the board at the X PRIZE Foundation where he is focused on using incentive prizes to find solution to many of the societal challenges. He recently launched a million-dollar Women Safety XPRIZE to empower the women around the world.
Neil Grimmer
Neil Grimmer is the founder and CEO of Habit, pioneering personalized nutrition through deep science and food innovation. Having always been one to play with his food, he co-founded Plum Organics, the nation’s leading organic baby food brand, to bring the best, healthy food to kids. Today, Neil is on a mission to change the world through food once again – this time for grown-ups. Neil’s diverse, creative background ranges from being a punk rock musician and artist to product design at IDEO and now, building start-ups of his own.
& many more
Michael Graz
Michael has 25 years of commercial, research and teaching experience in the life sciences, biotechnology and food processing sectors. Over this period of time he has held senior management, advisory and technical consultancy roles. He has managed turnaround situations in corporate environments, established startups and developed services in corporate and SME organisations and with clients who have included governmental and intergovernmental bodies. This has taken him to live on 4 continents and to work across 5. With 2 PhDs, numerous papers and international conference presentations, joint inventorship on 6 patents, Michael has a deep understanding of bacterial functioning and antimicrobial resistance in infectious diseases.
For the past 10 years he has been active in the diagnostics and biotech sectors in South Wales and in his last role achieved Orphan Designation from the FDA for an anti-virulence factor against Pseudomonas aeruginosa in CF patients. He is the Managing Director of Cardiff-based Q5 Healthcare, a life sciences company with a focus on developing rapid, point of care diagnostics to improve quality of life for patients with life changing bacterial infections.
Dr. Klaus Hellmann
Remko van Leeuwen
Remko van Leeuwen has a medical background in the field of infectious diseases - and more than 25 years of drug development and clinical trial experience under his belt, both in the industry as well as in the academic arena. He knows both worlds inside out, have a large network, and therefore able to build bridges between them.
Remko founded Madam Therapeutics in 2011, as he wanted to do something to about the significant deficit in the development of novel antimicrobial compounds over the two decades. In the 7 years since it’s foundation, the company has matured into a near clinical stage biotech company that has developed a new generation of compounds that manage to knock out persister cells residing in bacterial biofilms. As highlighted in a recent editorial comment on the website of Science1, this represents the first published demonstration of the killing of such persister cells, which is anticipated to have great potential to treat patients with complicated infections.
In these 7 years, Remko has met many other entrepreneurs that are as motivated as he is to bring new antimicrobials to the market. At the same time, he also encountered a lot of sepsis and reluctance to make serious investments from professional investors and established companies in this field. He will share his experiences from the roller-coaster road to get his companies financed, and will share his ideas on how to improve ties between medical professionals and veterinarian to preserve the health and well-being of all species.
1. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/01/powerful-new-weapon-against-drug-resistant-bacteria-was-inspired-human-body