Speaker Bios
Dr. Lars Abrahmsén »
Navroze M. Alphonse »
Dr. Yuval Binur »
David Brennan »
Robert Charpentier »
Frederick Frank »
William J. Gedale »
Udayan Gupta »
Dr. Marianne Hansson »
Dr. William A. Haseltine »
David P. Hochman »
Thomas von Koch »
Dr. Johnson Y.N. Lau»
Elisabet Legnerfält »
J. Jay Lobell »
Dr. Sharon Mates »
Dr. David Naveh »
Niklas Prager »
Dr. Pascale Richetta »
Dr. Francesco De Rubertis »
Dr. Eugen Steiner »
Professor Jesper Tegnér »
Professor Mathias Uhlén »
Peter Utterström »
Jacob Wallenberg »
Top of page »
Dr. Lars Abrahmsén
Chief Scientific Officer at Affibody AB since January 2004, previously senior project team leader at Biovitrum. Including 2 years as a postdoctorial fellow at Genentech, California, he has more than 19 years experience from the pharmaceutical and biotech industri. He has a PhD in Biochemistry from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
Top of page »
Navroze M. Alphonse
Navroze Alphonse is a Managing Director of Pequot Capital Management and portfolio manager of the firm’s public healthcare strategy. Mr. Alphonse joined the firm in 2003. Previously, Mr. Alphonse was a senior analyst for Sands Point Capital Management, LLC. Prior to that, Mr. Alphonse was a Vice President at Leerink Swann & Company where he conducted equity research for specialty pharmaceuticals. Mr. Alphonse also held positions as an Associate in equity research for SG Cowen Securities and NationsBanc Montgomery Securities. Mr. Alphonse graduated with a B.A. in Economics and English from the University of Vermont.
Top of page »
Dr. Yuval Binur
Dr. Binur has over 23 years of venture capital experience in the US, Europe and in Israel. In addition to co-founding ATI together with Martin B. Leon, MD and Rick Geoffrion, Dr. Binur has been a founding partner of Medica Venture Partners, a global health care and life sciences venture capital fund operating from Israel. For 9 years prior to co-founding Medica, Dr Binur was a member of Adler & Co., a major U.S. venture capital firm based in New York. He has been a board member of over 30 venture-backed companies in the areas of pharmaceuticals, medical devices, software and electronics among other boards. Dr. Binur was a director of Percutaneous Valve Technologies, Inc. (PVT), a company that has revolutionized the replacement of heart valves and was sold during 2004 to Edwards Lifesciences, Inc. Dr. Binur holds a B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering and Ph. D. degree in physics.
Top of page »
David Brennan
David Brennan was appointed Chief Executive Officer of AstraZeneca effective 1 January 2006.
From 2001 until his appointment to CEO, David was President and Chief Executive Officer of AstraZeneca LP, the Company’s North America subsidiary. He was appointed Executive Board Director of AstraZeneca in 2005, with responsibility for the United States, the company's largest market, as well as all North American operations.
David began his career in 1975 at Merck, where he rose from sales representative in the U.S. Division to general manager of Chibret International, a French subsidiary of Merck specializing in ophthalmics. He joined AstraMerck in 1992 with responsibility for helping to build the joint venture into a multi-billion dollar business in the U.S. Prior to the AstraZeneca merger he was responsible for business planning and development at Astra Pharmaceuticals. He was appointed Senior Vice-President of Commercial Operations of AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals LP in 1999. He is an alumnus of Gettysburg College.
David is an Executive Director of AstraZeneca PLC, and a Member of the Executive Board of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). In addition, he is past Chairman of the Board of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Chapter of the American Heart Association, and Honorary Board member of the US CEO Roundtable on Cancer.
David is married with four children and four grandchildren. He enjoys scuba diving, cycling and is an amateur photographer.
Top of page »
Robert Charpentier
Mr Charpentier, born in 1965, graduated with a MSc in economics with a focus on international finance from the Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration in Helsinki in 1989. He joined Goldman, Sachs & Co. in London in 1989 where he worked as an analyst and associate before becoming the Executive Director of Debt Capital Markets for Nordic clients. In 1997 Mr Chapentier moved to Sweden and became Senior Vice President, Head of Corporate Banking, for Swedbank Markets, the investment and merchant banking unit of the Swedbank Group. In 2000 he was promoted to the position of Executive Vice President at the Swedbank Group as Deputy Head of Swedbank Markets. Finally, in 2006 Mr Charpentier was appointed Managing Director of Kaupthing Bank Sweden.
Top of page »
Frederick Frank
Frederick Frank is Vice Chairman and Director of Lehman Brothers, Inc. where he joined as a Partner in 1969. Mr. Frank brings to the Board over forty-five years of experience. Prior to joining Lehman Brothers he was co-director of research and a Director of Smith, Barney & Co. Incorporated. He serves on the Board of Directors of several public companies including Pharmaceutical Product Development; Predix Pharmaceuticals, Diagnostic Products; eSoft. In addition, he is a Trustee Emeritus of the Hotchkiss School; An Advisory Director of the Yale School of Management; The Bloomberg School of Public Health; The Harvard School of Public Health; Chairman of The Irvington Institute of Immunological Research, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and he serves on the Advisory Board of the MIT Center for Biomedical Innovation. Mr. Frank holds an undergraduate degree from Yale University, an MBA from Stanford University School of Business Administration, and he also has a CFA degree.
Top of page »
William J. Gedale
William J. Gedale is a Managing General Partner of NGN Capital. He has been in the investment business since 1965. Mr. Gedale joined NGN from Mount Everest Advisors, which he founded in 1996. He has served as an investment advisor to individuals and as a full time consultant to Warburg-Pincus Capital Management, the world's largest venture capital firm, between 1999 and 2001. In this capacity, he initiated the $140 million dollar financing of ZymoGenetics. He also helped arrange the $350 million funding by Sandoz (Novartis) of the Scripps Research Institute and the $40 million funding of the Neuroscience Institute of La Jolla, California (of which he is a trustee). Before founding Mount Everest Advisors he was a Managing Director at John W. Bristol & Co. in 1995. Before this, as of 1989, Mr. Gedale was President & Chief Executive Officer of General American Investors, which he had joined in 1969. He is currently Chairman of Promosone and Vice Chairman of Enzybiotics and Director of Neurologix. He has been a director of Ga mco (Gabelli Holding), General American Investors, Allied Clinical Laboratories, U.S. Home Health Care, Unilab Corporation, and BioReliance Corporation. William Gedale holds an M.B.A. from New York University, a J.D. from Fordham Law School, and an A.B. from Syracuse University.
Top of page »
Udayan Gupta
Udayan Gupta is one of the senior most South Asian business journalists in the United States.
He is editor of the new "Done Deals: Venture Capitalists Tell Their Stories" (Harvard Business School
Press, September 2000).
Gupta is the founder of biztrail.com, a multimedia news and information publisher. A small-business
development and strategy consultant and freelance business journalist, he served as a Senior Special Writer
for the Wall Street Journal for over a decade. Gupta was also a Walter Bagehot Fellow in Business &
Economics Journalism. Gupta graduated in Economics from Harvard University, then took up filmmaking and
film criticism. He is the director of two documentary film portraits and has a Masters in Film from Boston
University. Late in the 1970s, Gupta began developing an interest in the new technologies and in the
entrepreneurial revolution that was taking place. He started writing for a startup magazine, Venture, and
for a number of other national publications. In 1985, he joined the Wall Street Journal to cover venture
capital and continued doing so until his departure in 1996. Between 1992 and 1995, The Media Guide
recognized Gupta as one of the leading business writers in the U.S.
He lives in New York city, with his wife, Kathleen, and son, Arun.
Top of page »
Dr. Marianne Hansson
Dr. Hansson is Chief
Executive Officer of Atlas Antibodies AB since February 2006
and co-founder of Atlas Antibodies AB.
Dr. Hansson has a research background in biotechnology
and more than 8 years experience in marketing and business
development, most recently from Affibody AB.
Dr. Hansson earned her PhD from the Royal Institute of
Technology.
Top of page »
Dr. William A. Haseltine
Dr. William A. Haseltine, PhD, is Chairman of Haseltine
Global Health, LLC, a virtual pharmaceutical company
dedicated to developing new and more efficient means to
develop new life saving drugs and medical devices. He is
also President of the Haseltine Foundation for Medical
Sciences and the Arts, a foundation that supports access to
high quality health for the poor and middle class of
developing countries and that also fosters a dialog between
sciences and the arts. He is an Adjunct Professor at The
Scripps Institute for Medical Research.
Dr. Haseltine has an active career in both Science and
Business. He was a professor at Harvard Medical School from
1976-1993 where he was the chair of two academic research
departments. He is well known for his pioneering work on
cancer and HIV/AIDS. He is the Founder of Human Genome
Sciences, Inc and served as the Chairman and CEO of the
Company until 2004.He is also the founder of seven other
successful biotechnology companies. He serves as an advisor
to CMEA, a venture capital company, and to several
biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies.
Dr. Haseltine is active in public service. He is Co-Chair of
the President’s Council of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory,
a member of the Advisory Board of the Global Coalition on
HIV/AIDS, a member of the Board of One World Health, a
member of the CEO Council of the New York Academy of
Science, and Chair of the Berkeley Center of Synthetic
Biology. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the
Brookings Institution, a member of both the Council on
Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, and a
member of the Chairman’s Circle of the Asia Society.
He resides in Washington DC and New York City.
Top of page »
David P. Hochman
Mr. Hochman is a Managing General Partner of Accelerated Technologies Partners (ATP), a medical technology-focused investment partnership that employs a proprietary model based on close collaboration with leading physicians to create and build paradigm-changing companies.
Prior to joining ATP, Mr. Hochman was Managing Partner of Orchestra Partners, LLC, a New York based venture consulting firm and was previously Chief Executive Officer of Spencer Trask Edison Partners, LLC (STEP), a principal investment partnership focused on early stage healthcare companies.
In 2004, Mr. Hochman co-founded Prescient Medical, Inc. with Marvin L. Woodall, the founding President of Johnson & Johnson Interventional Systems (now Cordis) which commercialized the first balloon-expandable coronary stent. Prescient is focused on commercializing new technologies to detect and treat vulnerable plaque, now viewed as the major cause of heart attacks. As a executive of the corporation, Mr. Hochman led the execution of three venture rounds for the company, raising in the aggregate over $34 million in total equity capital. He continues to serve as a director of Prescient as well as Chairman of its finance committee. Mr. Hochman is also a director and co-founder of Modigene, Inc., a US headquartered biopharmaceutical company developing long-lasting therapeutic proteins with operations based primarily in Israel. Mr. Hochman is also a member of the board of Orchestra Therapeutics, Inc. an immuno-therapy company focused on autoimmune diseases which Mr. Hochman helped to turnaround, refocus and re-brand, and is an observer to the board of Health Dialog Services Corporation, a world leader care management company which he helped to finance during the early stages of it growth. Mr. Hochman played an active role in the turnaround of Idera Phamaceuticals (formerly Hybridon, Inc.), now a world leader in Toll-Like Receptor based therapeutics.
Mr. Hochman has led financing transactions for over 20 early-stage companies, raising over $420 million in equity capital. He graduated with honors from the University of Michigan. He also currently serves as a director of the following nonprofit organizations: AIDS Action Foundation; Citizens Committee for New York; and the Mollie Parnis Livingston Foundation.
Top of page »
Thomas von Koch
Thomas von Koch was part of the original team that founded EQT Partners in 1994.
Previously, Mr. von Koch worked at Investor AB which he joined in 1992 to work in equity research, corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions. Mr. von Koch is currently a director of the boards of Gambro and KBW .
Mr. von Koch graduated from the Stockholm School of Economics in 1992 with two majors (Financial Economics and Accounting & Finance)
Top of page »
Dr. Johnson Y.N. Lau, M.B., B.S., M.D., F.R.C.P.
Dr. Lau has a varied background including academic medicine, financial management and executive management of pharmaceutical/biotech companies. Dr. Lau is currently a senior advisor to Novartis and a managing partner of Life Science Advisors. He was formerly a managing director of healthcare investment banking of Roth Capital Partners. Previously he was the Chairman and CEO of Ribapharm Inc. where he led the second largest IPO in the 20 years of biotechnology history. Prior he was Senior VP and Head of R&D at ICN Pharmaceuticals. Prior he was Senior Director of Antiviral Therapy at Schering-Plough. Prior he was a faculty of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition as well as Medical Microbiology and Molecular Genetics in the University of Florida. Dr. Lau was involved with a number of successful Investigational New Drugs (INDs) and New Drug Applications (NDAs). He has published over 200 scientific papers, over 50 reviews/editorials in leading scientific journals, and edited two books. Dr. Lau also serves as a member of the Board of Directors of Chelsea Therapeutics (NASDAQ: CHTP), Vioquest (OTCBB: VQPH) and Chairman of the Board of Kinex Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Lau is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of the United Kingdom and received his medical degree and doctoral degree from the University of Hong Kong.
Top of page »
Elisabeth Legnerfält
Elisabeth Legnerfält is a Senior Associate within the EC and Competition Law Group at Delphi & Co. She has extensive experience of advising international pharmaceutical companies regarding competition law issues and has successfully brought action in Swedish courts regarding trademark infringements within the pharmaceutical sector. She also advises on public procurement, marketing law issues, and pharmaceutical regulatory issues.
Elisabeth Legnerfält has a law degree from Stockholm University and a LL.M in EC- and Competition law from the European University Institute in Florence, 1998. She has made a court service at the Stockholm Administrative Court and has seven years experience from law firms.
Top of page »
J. Jay Lobell
Mr. Lobell has served as Chief Executive Officer, Secretary and a member of the Board of Directors of Paramount Acquisition Corp. since October 2005. Mr. Lobell has served as President and Chief Operating Officer of Paramount BioCapital Asset Management, Inc. and Paramount Biosciences, LLC since January 2005, and is a registered representative of Paramount BioCapital, Inc. From 1996 through December 2004, Mr. Lobell was a partner at Covington & Burling, a law firm. Mr. Lobell received his B.A. from Queens College in 1985 and his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1988.
Top of page »
Dr. Sharon Mates
Dr. Mates is Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO of Intra-Cellular
Therapies, Inc., and has over twenty years of experience in
the biotechnology industry ranging from founding several
start-up ventures to leading a publicly traded company.
From 1989-1998 Dr. Mates was the President of North American
Vaccine and its predecessor companies. Dr. Mates was a
co-founder of Functional Genetics Inc. and served as its
Chairman and CEO from December 2000-August 2003. Upon
co-founding ITI and through August 2003, Dr. Mates was the
CEO of FGI and ITI. In August 2003, Dr. Mates relinquished
her leadership role in FGI to accelerate the growth of ITI.
She is a member Emeritus of the
Board of Visitors of the Biotechnology Institute of the
University of Maryland, a member of the Advisory Council of
the Center for Society and Health at the Harvard School of
Public Health, and a member of the Board of Directors of
NYBA and Gilda’s Club of New York.
Education:
Dr. Mates received her Ph.D. from the University of
Washington in 1981. She completed her post-doctoral
training at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard
Medical School from 1981 – 1984.
Top of page »
Dr. David Naveh
Dr. Naveh worked for Bayer Corporation from 1992 until April 1 2007,,and for the past 7 years as Chief Technical Officer Bayer Biological Products, Worldwide. David Led the development and commercialization of KG-FS, currently Bayer's most profitable drug, and prior to that, David led the technical transformation of Bayer's Berkeley site from a plasma fractionation to a Biotechnology company, and world leader in cell culture technology. Prior to Bayer Corporation, Dr. Naveh was responsible for Fermentation and Purification of Antibody production as Director Biotechnology Operations of Centocor, where he led the Technical/production aspects of development and commercialization of Remicaid, Reopro, Myoscint and Centoxin. (1988-1992). From 1984 to 1988, Dr. Naveh served in various of Process Development and Plant Management positions at Schering Plough, participating in commercialization of Intron in Brinny Ireland and co discovering IL-4 and GM-CSF David is a graduate of Technion in Haifa, Israel (1980). He received a Ph.D. in Biochemical Engineering and an M.B.A. from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 1982, and from 1982-1984, he was an Assistant Professor (tenure track) at the University of Wisconsin, Madison where he taught plant design and biophysical chemistry. He has authored over 30 peer reviewed papers and 10 patentsin the fields of IL-4. GM-CSF, purification and cell culture technology. David is on the editorial board of "Bioseparations." Dr. Naveh has served on boards of Directors of Public and Private companies since 1995, most notably Discovery labs (DSCO), and currently Bionovo (BNVI), where he also chairs the compensation and Audit committees. David resides in San Francisco, California (Piedmont).
Top of page »
Niklas Prager
Mr. Prager started his professional career in the pharmaceutical industry in the US 10 years ago. Through positions of increasing responsibility in both sales and marketing in the US and in Sweden, Mr. Prager was appointed Managing Director of Pfizer in Sweden in 2005 after having been with the company for one year.
Mr. Prager holds a MBA degree from the Stockholm School of Economics and did parts of his MBA at the University of Michigan School of Business Administration in Ann Arbor. He currently serves on the Boards of the Swedish Pharmaceutical Industry Association, the Swedish American Chamber of Commerce and the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce.
Top of page »
Dr. Pascale Richetta
Dr. Pascale Richetta is currently Abbott Europe Region North Director and leads Abbott Europe Business Development Team. She joined Abbott in March 2004 as Abbott General Manager, Belgium. Previously, she was heading France Operations in GSK.
She has close to 20 years of pharmaceutical industry experience in different countries, France, UK and Belgium and at Corporate level. She has been working in various therapy areas among which CNS and immunology-based therapy.
She lives in Paris.
Top of page »
Dr. Francesco De Rubertis
Francesco is the General Partner responsible for the firm's life sciences practice as well as Index's networks within the scientific community. His areas of expertise include biotechnology and biopharmaceuticals. He joined Index in 1998 and has served on the board of numerous companies including Genmab, Bioxell, Addex, Parallele, 7TM and Pangenetics. Prior to joining Index, Francesco was involved in post-doctoral research in genetics at the Whitehead Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is also the author of several publications in international scientific journals including Nature. Francesco has a BA in Genetics and Microbiology from the University of Pavia and a PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Geneva. He is also a CFA charter holder.
Top of page »
Dr. Eugen Steiner
Eugen Steiner, MD, PhD, is a partner of HealthCap, a leading European health care venture capital fund.
Dr. Steiner is a serial entrepreneur and has served as Chief Executive Officer or Chairman of the Board of several biotechnology and biomedical companies, including Affibody, Biolipox, Biostratum, Calab Medical, Creative Peptides, Eurona Medical, Global Genomics, LTB4, PyroSequencing, Melacure Therapeutics and Visual Bioinformatics.
Until 1987 Dr. Steiner practiced Medicine at the Karolinska University Hospital in Huddinge/Stockholm. He became a specialist in Clinical Pharmacology and was active in pharmacogenetic research at the Karolinska Institute, where he had also received his medical and scientific degrees.
Top of page »
Professor Jesper Tegnér
Jesper Tegnér is the first Swedish Professor in Computational Biology (2002- ) and co-founder (with Dr. Björkegren, 2003-) of the first Swedish BioIT company - Clinical Gene Networks (VinnNu award 2005).
After his multi-degree-training including Mathematics and Medical School he has been an Alfred P Sloan and Wenner-Gren 5 year Fellow during his research visit in Boston, USA. The Tegnér-Björkegren Computational Medicine Team has not only published 54 papers since 2002 but also built the largest multi-organ gene expression database from patients suffering from atherosclerosis - a major killer. This integrated experimental and computational work set the stage for improved compound evaluation of available drugs as well as identification of novel drug targets in the cardiovascular space.
He also has developed a number of new Ph.D. courses on systems and computational biology with a medical focus including the recent success with a national PhD course - Systems Biology - from model organisms to complex diseases. To stimulate the public interest for Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Medicine he also gives popular science lectures.
For more information and web links see Jesper’s page at www.karlavagen90.se »
Top of page »
Professor Mathias Uhlén
Mathias Uhlén is Professor of Microbiology at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden. Dr. Uhlén is member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science (IVA), the Royal Swedish Academy of Science (KVA) and the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). He is Vice-President of the European Proteomics Association (EuPA) and member of the Human Proteome Organization (HUPO) council. He was Vice-President of the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), responsible for external relations, from 1999 to 2001 and he was the chairman of the Swedish Biochemical and Molecular Biology Society (SFMB) from 1994 to 1999. Dr Uhlén has more than 290 publications in bioscience with the focus on the development and use of affinity reagents in biotechnology and biomedicine.
In the early eighties, Dr. Uhlén cloned and characterized staphylococcal protein A, which is now used extensively for purification of antibodies both in diagnostics and therapy. He also showed in 1983 that protein A could be used as an affinity tag for purification of other proteins. The use of affinity tags for purification of recombinant proteins are now widely used in bioscience. In the late eighties, Uhlén published the use of magnetic micro spheres with streptavidin for automated solid phase applications. Such laboratory systems based on streptavidin beads are at present frequently used both in research and diagnostics. In the 90:ies, his group described a new principle for affinity reagents, called Affibodies, and showed their use as research tool and recently as potential cancer therapeutics. Uhlén and colleagues also developed a new strategy for DNA analysis called Pyrosequencing, a method that has recently been further developed by a US company into a highly parallelized sequencing instrument.
Dr Uhlén is currently working on the Human Protein Resource Project (HPR), with the aim to systematically map the human proteome. In August 2005, the first version of a Human Protein Atlas was published (www.proteinatlas.org) with more than 400,000 high-resolution images representing 700 human proteins.
He has founded several companies, including Pyrosequencing AB (Biotage AB), Affibody AB, SweTreeGenomics AB, Magnetic Biosolutions AB, Atlas Antibodies AB and Creative Peptides AB. He has received numerous awards, including The Svedberg prize in 1992, the Göran Gustavsson prize in 1993, the gold medal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences in 2004, the Most Noble Order of the Seraphim - the Order of His Majesty the King in 2004, the Jerker Porath award in 2005, the Akzo Nobel Award in 2005 and the HUPO Distinguished Award and KTH Great Prize both in 2006.
Top of page »
Peter Utterström
Peter Utterström has a long experience in tax and corporate law with a focus on M&A, transactions and financial issues. He is a member of Delphi & Co's Tax Department and is also heading the Life Science group of the firm with approximately 10 lawyers. He has been partner of Delphi & Co since 1983. During 1998 and 2003 he was the Managing Partner of Delphi & Co and is currently the senior partner.
Over the past 20 years Peter Utterström has been the advisor to national and multinational enterprises in primarily the IT-, Finance- and the Life Science sector advising clients regarding corporate governance, investments and transactions.
Top of page »
Jacob Wallenberg
Jacob Wallenberg is Chairman of the Board of Investor AB and Vice-Chairman of SEB, Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB where he previously served as CEO and Chairman, and a Board member of the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. AB.
Mr. Wallenberg serves also on the Boards of Atlas Copco AB (Vice Chairman), SAS AB (Vice Chairman) and ABB. Mr. Wallenberg also serves on a number of non-corporate Boards such as the Nobel Foundation.
Born in Stockholm 1956, Mr. Wallenberg was educated at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Economics in 1980 and an MBA in 1981.