Dr Adam Stoten is SVP and Head of Academic Partnerships at Evotec (UK) Ltd, where he is responsible for creating new international partnerships (BRIDGEs) to accelerate the translation of academic science into new medicines, and for the team that manages Evotec’s involvement in grant-funded research. He also serves as Site Head for Evotec’s Oxford R&D campus and as a director of two Evotec UK subsidiaries. Prior to Evotec, Adam was Chief Operating Officer and executive director at Oxford University Innovation Ltd, worked as Deputy General Manager for a spinout company developing a clinical stage TB vaccine, and started his career in healthcare consulting and technology transfer roles. Adam has held several non-executive director and observer roles on the boards of UK biotech companies EvOx Therapeutics, Barinthus Bio, MiroBio and Dark Blue Therapeutics, the latter being Evotec’s first BRIDGE spinout, which was subsequently acquired by Amgen in 2025 for $840m. He has been a non-executive director of Knowledge Exchange UK, the UK professional association for knowledge exchange, and ATTP, the body that maintains international standards for the knowledge exchange profession. He also chairs the UKRI PoC Fund life sciences committee and a TenU Working Group to generate guidance on establishing and improving PoC funds.

Innovation executive with extensive experience in the digital transformation of medical diagnostics and patient care. As Innovation Hub Director at Bracco, he leads programs that combine research technology and clinical practice, turning data and images into operational tools for physicians and healthcare processes. He promotes collaborative platforms, data integration, clinical adoption and scalable solutions, with a strategic focus on artificial intelligence and advanced key predictive models.

Arezki Yaïche is since 2014 a financial journalist specialised in M&A and EU competition law. As a Senior France Correspondent and Paris Bureau Chief for the global M&A newswire Mergermarket (owned by ION Group), he writes on all types of transactions from competition issues, early stage fundraises, and private deals to takeovers of listed companies and IPOs.

Arezki was previously Senior Correspondent Antitrust for regulatory newswire MLex in Brussels between 2019 and 2021. Before that he worked four years as M&A reporter and Paris Bureau Chief for Mergermarket. Arezki also has a six-year experience as Communication consultant specialised in Finance and EU regulation. He worked for financial and public institutions including Dexia Asset Management in Brussels, Credit Agricole Assurances in France, the French embassy in Stockholm, the European Parliament, and the French Ministry for Agriculture

Constant Beroulle is an Associate at Newfund Capital, a French-American early stage venture capital firm with 400M€+ in AuM, investing across health tech, MedTech, and digital health. Trained as a pharmacist, he brings a clinical lens to early-stage healthcare investing, helping founders navigate the shifting landscape between scientific innovation and capital.

Dominik Leisi is an Investment Manager at Atlantic Bridge, having joined the team from Albion Capital and several years UCL’s TTO. Dominik has a background in medtech and special pharmaceuticals from his previous roles at BTG (now Boston Scientific) and Nobel Biocare. At Atlantic Bridge Dominik is looking after HealthTech (Biotech, MedTech, Diagnostics and Digital) opportunities with a special focus on early-stage opportunities (Seed to Series A) within Atlantic Bridge’s Innovation Fund. Neurent Medical, Luma Vision, CroiValve, Luminate Medical, Bluedrop Medical and LaNua Medical are some of the portfolio Companies that Dominik is the internal champion of.  Dominik holds a BSc in Life Sciences Technologies from the University of Northern Switzerland and a MSc in Innovation and Management from Imperial College Business School.

Elizabeth has worked at the intersection of international investment and commercialization within healthcare for the last 15 years, spanning 28 countries and all classes of complexity, building a reputation for strategic risk management for both investors and companies.
She is on the Board of Directors of a business angel network, SWAN Impact, where she focuses on impact-driven healthcare startup investments. Leveraging experience as a senior executive at startups through large public companies while living in Europe and South America, she is a Managing Partner at Venture Atlas Labs, a commercialization firm that supports global companies in US market success alongside investors, government agencies, and innovation centres.
She has worked in global innovation at the leading university in Texas, and she serves as a US federal grant reviewer for medical devices, an advisor to numerous accelerators, and is a frequent keynote speaker.

Emmanuel B. Vander Poorten (Member, IEEE) is currently a Professor with the Faculty of Engineering Technology, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, where he has coordinated the activities of the Robot-Assisted Surgery (RAS) Group since 2010. He received the degree in mechanical engineering from KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, in 2000, and the doctoral degree in engineering from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, in 2007. He has participated in and coordinated a large number of European Union-funded collaborative research projects on surgical robotics. His research interests include medical device design, robotic comanipulation, haptics, teleoperation, control of flexible instruments, and robotic catheters. He has maintained a close collaboration with UZ Leuven, the university hospital of Leuven, throughout his career and has conducted, in close collaboration with the hospital, several clinical trials with in-house developed surgical robotic technology, including world first interventions on robot-assisted retinal vein cannulation and wave-division-multiplier-based FBG shape sensing inside the pancreatic duct. While interacting with the tech transfer office of KU Leuven, he works to translate the developed technology to the market.

Esther is the Founding Managing Partner of THENA Capital, a £45m UK based MedTech venture capital fund focused on digital healthcare solutions and medical devices. Before moving into VC, Esther spent over 10 years as a trusted advisor to large brands, particularly within the consumer healthcare sector, advising them on growth strategies and how best to adapt commercial models to changing environments and trends.

As one of the founders of Sarsia, and the principal analyst regarding life science investments, Farzad brings nearly 30 years of drug development expertise and management from large global pharma and early-stage start-ups. Farzad’s experience spans multiple national and global preclinical and clinical drug development initiatives at both administrative and Board levels. In addition to receiving training in entrepreneurial business financing from London Business School, Farzad obtained his doctoral education in pharmacology from the University of Edinburgh Medical School, UK and postdoctoral training from HaukelandUniversity Hospital Bergen, Norway.

Fernando Erazo is Vice President of United Imaging Healthcare (UIH) Europe, based in Rotterdam, where since 2025 he has been building the company’s European organisation to serve customers across MRI, CT, PET/CT, X-ray, ultrasound, radiotherapy and AI. Before joining UIH, he built his career at Philips, where he held senior European and global roles bringing radiology imaging and informatics solutions to customers worldwide and launching new businesses and technologies. His work has centred on involving hospitals and academic centres early to define clinical needs, validating solutions in clinical practice and bringing them into routine care. At UIH he leads a growing team and partner network focused on lasting collaborations with clinicians to bring innovation into practice at scale and make advanced diagnostic imaging accessible and affordable, in line with the company’s mission of equal healthcare for all.

Florence joined Kurma Partners in 2022 and is an Associate in the Biofund team, based in Paris. She focuses on early-stage biotech investments and company creation. Prior to joining Kurma, Florence gained experience in healthcare investment at Omnes Capital. She holds an MSc in Bioscience Engineering, specialised in Cell and Gene Biotechnology, from Ghent University, and an MSc in Pharmaceutical Management from ESCP Business School.

Professor Garry Duffy is Established Professor of Health Technology Innovation at University of Galway, Professor of Anatomy and Head of the Department of Anatomy and Regenerative Medicine at RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences, and Director of the ARC Hub for HealthTech, a €34 million Research Ireland program creating commercial ventures from research. A two-time Fulbright Scholar with collaborations at MIT, Georgia Tech and Harvard, Garry has built an international reputation in soft robotics for medical devices, particularly drug delivery systems. His research has generated 8 granted patents and led to the founding of campus spin out FeelTect (chronic wound monitoring). He has coordinated major EU-funded programs (AMCARE, DRIVE, DELIVER) and received the Science Foundation Ireland Prize for Industry Partnership with Boston Scientific. With over 6000 citations and 33 PhD students supervised, he bridges cutting-edge research with commercial application. At the ARC Hub for HealthTech, Garry leads a multi-institutional partnership targeting 9 spin-out companies by 2029, working at the intersection of research innovation and market-ready healthtech solutions.

A long-standing supporter of BioFIT, Gerald has a background in Management Consultancy and academia. A London Business School alumnus with a Doctorate from Oxford University, he has experience of several start-ups and their exits, with considerable experience in building company executive boards, which has led him now to sit on VC investment committees, among other roles. He is recognised speaker at many events across Europe.

In 2010, he founded Innovation DB to help business access academic actionable research. Over years of work, IDB has created a system that identifies, captures and describes emerging technologies, drawn from over 20,000 academic institutions. This provides an unparalleled dataset of research with real-world applications, that includes all biotech and pharma-related tech transfer activity to be found globally.

Ingrid Kelly is a Partner at XISTA Science Ventures, an Austrian VC investing in young European startups and academic spinouts harnessing transformative science to address real world problems. She sits on the board of several life sciences startups. Over more than a decade as a technology transfer professional, Ingrid was instrumental in creation of numerous startups from academic settings and is one of the initiators and organizers of xbio, a biomedical entrepreneurship program educating researchers interested in making the transition from academia to the startup environment. Ingrid is a qualified European patent attorney with experience in the pharma industry. She holds a PhD in molecular biology from the University of Cambridge.

Ivo Svejkovský is Director of the Centre for Knowledge and Technology Transfer at Charles University, where he works at the intersection of research, innovation and industry, supporting the translation of academic knowledge and research results into practical applications, intellectual property protection and commercialisation.
His professional background combines technology transfer and innovation management with hands-on experience in international clinical research. Before joining Charles University, he worked at ICON plc, a global clinical research organisation, as Global Contracts Lead, negotiating clinical trial agreements and budgets between pharmaceutical sponsors and hospitals and clinical research sites across Europe, North and South America, and Israel.
At Charles University, he has designed and is implementing a university-wide education and professional development programme for students, academics and researchers in entrepreneurship, innovation and intellectual property, as well as the negotiation of clinical trial agreements and budgets from the perspective of research sites and Principal Investigators.
He has also held leadership positions in research institutions of the Czech Academy of Sciences and made a significant contribution to the development of Czechia: Country for the Future 2.0, the Czech Republic’s national economic strategy launched in 2026.
In addition, he serves as an external expert for the European Commission, evaluating research and innovation projects under Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe.

Joana Caldeira is CEO and co-founder of Fetalix, which provides the first regenerative fetal-inspired biomaterial to treat back pain. She holds a PhD in Biomedicine and is also an Assistant researcher at i3S. In 2017, she managed to define age-related matrix signatures of healthy intervertebral discs. Her work led to several other collaborations in the field of the disc and heart regeneration.

Joana has secured funding from national and international agencies including EUROSPINE, AOSpine and ON Foundation, and has been honored with the L’Oréal Medal of Honor for Women in Science 2018. In 2023, she has been supported by Women TechEU from the European Commission and this year by EIC Pre-Accelerator, having been recognized with the CaixaImpulse.

She is passionate about science communication and regularly promotes lectures, events, and projects with younger generations to raise awareness and inspire future researchers.

Josef Bartl serves as Vice President of Corporate Strategy and M&A at Brainlab, a global leader in medical technology headquartered in Munich. For more than 25 years, Brainlab has been advancing surgery and radiation therapy through cutting-edge software and hardware solutions that improve patient care worldwide. Josef is responsible for the company’s strategic investments, mergers and acquisitions, and partnership initiatives, supporting Brainlab’s growth and innovation strategy through collaboration with startups, technology partners, and healthcare institutions.

Andrologist, MD CHU Lille, CH Lens, France

Julien is a tech-growth strategist with 20 years of experience translating product vision into global business. As Senior Corporate Director at Samsung Mobile, he led strategy and transformation for an $80B portfolio, establishing digital ventures and design-led customer experiences. Previously, Julien served in the Chairman’s Office of a major Asian conglomerate, focusing on growth opportunities across a range of industries. He began his career in IT consulting, rapidly advancing to Key Account Management for a multinational enterprise. Today Julien advises late‑stage startups, VCs and PE funds on go‑to‑market, product strategy and commercial leadership, while serving as a board advisor in digital health and wellness. He holds an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and an M.Eng. in Telecommunications from IMT Atlantique.

Kyun Thibaut is the Founder and CEO of COVARTIM, an engineering company that helps manufacturers develop and certify their Medical Devices. Located in Belgium (Brussels, Liège) and France (La Rochelle), COVARTIM supports its clients from all around the world at every step of the development of their solutions (R&D, prototyping, manufacturing, V&V, QA, RA, APEX QMS ®).

Kyun has more than 15 years of experience in the MedTech industry. In addition to leading COVARTIM, he regularly teaches at the university and other training programs.

Laurent Coste is an Innovation Lab Expert at the 3DEXPERIENCE Lab, Dassault Systèmes’ global startup accelerator and open innovation hub dedicated to supporting disruptive, deep-tech projects with a strong societal and environmental impact. He serves as the lead expert for the Healthcare and Life Sciences sector. Laurent joined Dassault Systèmes in 2017 following 20 years in Biopharma R&D, where he implemented new technologies and drove the digital transformation of clinical operations and data management.

Maggi Tebrake, Ph.D received her BSc in Chemistry from University of Applied Science, Krefeld, Germany, and her PhD in Chemistry from Loughborough University, United Kingdom.

Dr. Tebrake has 20 years plus experience in analytical method development and application development in areas including transdermal drug delivery, inhalation drug delivery and medical adhesives application development.

Dr. Tebrake currently supports Solventum Medical Technologies OEM business as Senior Specialist Application Engineer.

Maria Viegas Nascimento holds a PharmD and post‑graduate training in Health Technology Assessment (HTA). Since 2008, she has been fully dedicated to clinical research, holding different responsibilities across clinical studies coordination, project management, and regulatory consultancy, contributing to national and multinational trials, supporting market adoption of health technologies. Her profile is further strengthened by specialised training in the EU Medical Device Regulation and usability engineering, positioning her at the intersection of regulatory, clinical, and user‑centered evidence generation for health technologies.
She currently manages testing and validation activities at Instituto Pedro Nunes (IPN), focusing on pre‑clinical and clinical evidence generation for medical devices and digital health solutions. Her work centers on designing and coordinating validation strategies that ensure regulatory compliance, clinical relevance, and robust real‑world value, supporting the translation of innovative technologies into safe, effective, and market‑ready solutions.

Matti Hautsalo is Founding Partner at Nordic Science Investments (NSI), a venture fund accelerating university spinouts across the Nordics. NSI partners with founders and universities to invest at the spinout formation stage, help create more investable science-based startups, and allocate the majority of its capital to follow-on investments. NSI’s current portfolio includes 22 companies from 10 different universities across the fields of life sciences, health tech, and deep tech.

Before NSI, Matti worked with early-stage technology companies as an investor and active board member, both as a VC Partner (Aura Capital) and manager of a private investment vehicle, supporting research spinouts in the Nordics, the UK, and North America. His investment and board experience spans cancer immunotherapy (Valo Therapeutics), quantum computing and chemistry (Algorithmiq), live-cell analysis (CM Technologies), and whole-body MRI (Prenuvo).

For Matti, ecosystem impact means building trusted partnerships with technology transfer teams and researchers to accelerate the creation of high-quality science-based spinouts, while attracting talent, expertise, and investment to regional innovation hubs.

Michaela Fritz has been Vice-Rector for Research and Innovation at the Medical University of Vienna since 2015. She is responsible for research strategy and funding, career development, research assessment, technology transfer, intellectual property (IP) and spin-off strategy, international relations, core facilities, and good scientific practice.

Before joining the Medical University of Vienna, she led the Health and Environment Department at the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) and held senior roles at Life Science Austria Vienna Region and Austria Wirtschaftsservice (aws). Earlier in her career, she worked at Infineon Technologies and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley.

She studied materials science and obtained her PhD from ETH Zurich. She also serves on several national and European scientific and strategic bodies, including the Board of Trustees of ISTA and the Scientific Advisory Board of the European Forum Alpbach.

Dr. Oriol Iborra is CEO and co-founder of NIMBLE Diagnostics, a DeepTech spin-off developing the first non-invasive, non-ionizing system for continuous monitoring of implanted medical devices, with first focus on coronary stents. A cardiovascular researcher trained between Barcelona, Stanford and Harvard Medical School, he has authored 30+ publications and delivered 150+ international congress presentations. He combines strong clinical-scientific rigor with advanced training in entrepreneurship and life sciences management. As CEO, he leads financing strategy, investor relations and the company’s strategy toward creating a new standard of care for patients with implanted stents.

Pedro Lopes is Head of IP and Technology Transfer at CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine. He leads the identification, evaluation, protection, and commercialization of innovative biomedical technologies and supports strategic partnerships with industry and investors. Prior to CeMM, he held innovation-focused roles in the biopharmaceutical industry and has contributed to digital health and venture-building initiatives. His career has taken him across Portugal, Sweden, Austria, and the United States.

Piotr Orzechowski is the founder and CEO of Infermedica, a health AI company improving healthcare accessibility through AI-driven symptom analysis and triage. Since 2012, he has led Infermedica to secure over $50 million in funding and expand to 32 countries. Piotr holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from the Technical University of Wrocław and has participated in programs like the Google for Startups Global Alumni Program and the Leadership Academy for Poland. Recognized as a thought leader in digital health, he is also a husband, father of two boys, and enjoys tennis and playing guitar.

Dr. Ricardo Gaminha Pacheco is a physician-executive at the intersection of generative AI and drug development. As Strategic Partnering, Business Development & Licensing Director and Longevity Biotech Lead at Insilico Medicine (HKEX: 3696), he helps advance one of the industry’s most validated AI-driven pipelines — from forging high-value partnerships to accelerating AI-generated assets into the clinic.
Insilico Medicine, a clinical-stage generative AI biotech, has set a new benchmark in drug R&D: 22 preclinical candidates nominated since 2021, each progressing from project initiation to PCC in just 12–18 months (versus the traditional 2.5–4 years), with only 60–200 molecules synthesized per program and a 100% success rate from PCC to IND-enabling stage. Its lead asset, Rentosertib (ISM001-055), delivered the industry’s first clinical proofof-concept for AI-enabled drug discovery in a Phase IIa trial for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, published in Nature Medicine. The company’s partnership track record — including collaborations with Sanofi (up to $1.2B), Servier ($888M in oncology), Menarini/Stemline (over $550M), and Eli Lilly — underscores the translational power of its Pharma.AI platform spanning target discovery (PandaOmics), generative chemistry (Chemistry42), and clinical development.
Prior to Insilico, Dr. Pacheco spent over 15 years in senior medical and commercial roles across major pharma — including Roche, AstraZeneca, Novartis, and Takeda — driving product development, clinical strategy, and successful launches in immunology, neurodegeneration, and oncology. He holds an Executive MBA and Professional Certificate in Entrepreneurship from MIT Sloan, and is passionate about leveraging AI and TechBio to expand human healthspan.

Rudi Pauwels is a Belgian pharmacologist and serial biotechnology entrepreneur specializing in virology, antiviral drug development, and personalized medicine, with a career spanning over 35 years in academia and industry. He is best known for his pioneering research on HIV inhibitors and for co-founding several influential biotech firms that advanced treatments for infectious diseases and diagnostics.
Pauwels earned his PhD from KU Leuven and conducted early research at the Rega Institute for Medical Research, where he focused on virology and developed key assays for detecting anti-HIV compounds. His academic contributions include over 127 publications with more than 22,000 citations, earning an h-index of 71 in microbiology, particularly for work on non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors and viral replication mechanisms. Notable papers, such as his 1988 tetrazolium-based colorimetric assay for anti-HIV screening (cited over 2,500 times), revolutionized in vitro testing for antiviral agents.
In 1994, Pauwels co-founded Tibotec, a company specializing in retroviral therapies that was later acquired by Janssen Pharmaceuticals, leading to breakthroughs like the HIV drug etravirine. He also co-established Virco for viral resistance diagnostics, Galapagos Genomics for drug discovery, and Biocartis in 2007 for molecular diagnostics, serving as its CEO until 2017. More recently, Pauwels has focused on global health access through the Praesens Foundation, which he created to support diagnostics and treatments in low-resource settings, and serves as Partner and Executive Chairman at ANeuroTech, advancing nanotechnology for brain disorders.

Susie A. Ruff is the founder of RUFF & CO. Advisory and brings extensive experience in health innovation and health technology, both in Denmark and internationally. She has served in various key roles, including Director of the Healthcare Innovation Centre for the public hospitals in the Copenhagen Region, Head of Research and Innovation focusing on life sciences, and Regional Export Sales and Marketing Manager. She provides strategic and go-to-market support to industry and healthcare organizations across the Nordic region and the EU. Her work emphasizes user-driven and human-centric innovation. Additionally, she is an external lecturer at Copenhagen Business School for the M.Sc. in Health Innovation program, a member of the InnoExplorer Panel at the Innovation Fund Denmark and member of the board of Danish Life Science Cluster.

Victor Evian is Investment Manager BioMedTech at Truffle Capital, where he invests in and supports innovative companies developing breakthrough medical technologies.

Truffle Capital is a leading European Life Sciences business builder, with a unique company-building approach developed over the past 25 years. The firm builds MedTech and Biotech companies around academic research from the United States and Europe, and supports them through to commercialization.

With a background in biomedical engineering, Victor previously worked in various healthcare investment funds.