Speaker Bios for the 2009 summit
(In formation)
Jan Birgersson »
Dr. Yuval Binur »
Paul Bolno »
Håkan Bonander »
Diana DeGette »
Anders Ekblom »
Stephen Friend »
Peter Frishauf »
William J. Gedale »
Udayan Gupta »
Dr. William A. Haseltine »
Andrew Hessel »
Jay Keasling »
Stefan Larsson »
John-Michael Lind »
Julie Muraco »
Jordan Schreiber »
Dr. Eugen Steiner »
Professor Jesper Tegnér »
Professor Mathias Uhlén »
Hans Wigzell »
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Jan Birgersson
Jan Birgerson is the Country Managing Partner of Ernst & Young, Sweden. Jan joined Ernst & Young in 1984. He has spent 14 years of his career with Ernst & Young in Switzerland. Jan has years of experience as elected auditor of major Swedish and Swiss multinational corporations. He has comprehensive knowledge and experience relating to the management of international corporations, particularly in industrial industries and in the finance/bank industry. Furthermore, he has experience from IPOs, and transactions including acquisitions, disposals and joint ventures.
Jan served for ten years as a member of the Steering Committee of Ernst & Young’s International Global Accounts Group, which develops our service approach to Global Accounts.
Jan’s clients include the Scania Group, Swedish Export Credit Bank, Siemens AG Group, and the Nynas Group. Previous engagements include Tetra Laval, Adecco Group, ABB, Skandia, Investor, Holcim AG Group.
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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.
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Paul Bolno
Coming soon.
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Håkan Bonander
Håkan Bonander has been the Senior Vice President of ALMI Företagspartner Stockholm for over ten years. ALMI is a government- owned organization that operates through regional subsidiaries. The Company's main goal is to promote entrepreneurship throughout the country by financially supporting small and medium size companies. ALMI grants financing to inventors who want to commercialize their own inventions, as well as to serial entrepreneurs and existing companies who want to expand their business. There are no restrictions to what kind of business ALMI finances; hence the projects receiving financing range from high technology ventures started by scientists to entrepreneurs who want to start a local coffee shop. Håkan is also responsible for a small early seed-investing company, fully owned by the local ALMI subsidiary in Stockholm. The Company invests at an earlier stage than other private venture capitalists prefer, and has made investments in several different sectors. After six years, the result so far is impressing, especially related to the risk level of the investments.
Prior to his employment at ALMI, Håkan was working in the bank industry with financing companies of all sizes. He was working in different branch offices as a manager and thus has more than 25 years of experience from company investments.
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Diana DeGette
Chief Deputy Whip Diana DeGette is serving her 7th term in Congress as the Representative for the First District of Colorado. As the Vice Chair of the powerful Committee on Energy and Commerce, an exclusive congressional committee with vast jurisdiction over health care, trade, business, technology, food safety, and consumer protection, she is one of the leading voices in the health care debate in this country. As lead whip, she played a vital role in the reauthorization of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, has fought for tough food safety legislation, and was a key player in crafting a comprehensive consumer product safety bill.
U.S. Rep. DeGette is also the chief architect of legislation to expand stem cell research, which has been passed twice with broad, bipartisan support in Congress. The measure was vetoed twice by President George W. Bush – including his very first presidential veto. A life-long Coloradoan, U.S. Rep. DeGette is guided by traditional Western values. She’s also the author of the landmark Colorado Wilderness Act, which would protect and preserve 1.6 million acres of pristine land across Colorado for generations to come. She has fought to enhance her constituents’ access to affordable quality health care, expand mass transit, improve transportation in the Denver area, clean up environmental waste sites, and improve opportunities for small business.
Her book “Sex, Science, and Stem Cells: Inside the Right Wing Assault on Reason,” was released nationally during the summer of 2008 – just in time for the Democratic National Convention and as the general election begins to heat up. Her book is an insider’s expose on the Right Wing’s politicization of sex, science and reproductive health. It explores the persistent, ill-conceived, and ultimately even dangerous influence conservatives wield over some of the country’s highest-ranking officials over any policy relating to sex and science, including former President Bush.
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Anders Ekblom
Executive Vice President, Global Drug Development Anders Ekblom joined Astra in 1993 from the Karolinska Institute and Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm. His previous roles at AstraZeneca R&D have included: Vice President of Strategy, Portfolio and Alliances; Head of two Therapy areas being Respiratory and Inflammation and Pain Control, respectively. Most recently he has been responsible for Global Clinical Development, the largest single function in R&D, operating across drug development and life cycle management. Anders is a Director of the board of Albireo Ltd, British Pharmaceutical Group and MediImmune. He is an Associate Professor of Physiology at the Karolinska Institute, a medical doctor board certified in Anesthesiology and Intensive Care, and a doctor of dental surgery. He has long been active in both basic and clinical research resulting in over 60 original publications in peer reviewed journals and book chapters.
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Stephen Friend
Stephen Friend is the co-founder and President of Sage Bionetworks a non profit building a commons where clinical and genomic data can evolve causal models of disease to impact human health . He joined Merck in July 2001 after Merck's acquisition of Rosetta Inpharmatics for over two-thirds of a billion dollars. At Merck he has been instrumental in aligning molecular profiling with several key programs in Basic Research and strategically managed resources to ensure their effective integration. He built the Oncology group at Merck from a group of under one hundred people to a group that led the industry in putting 7 Onolcogy NCEs into humans in 2008.
Prior to joining Merck, Dr. Friend was recruited by Nobel Laureate Dr. Leland Hartwell to join the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center's Seattle Project, an advanced institute for drug discovery. While there, Drs. Friend and Hartwell developed a method for examining large patterns of genes which led them to co-found Rosetta Inpharmatics. Dr. Friend also held faculty positions at Harvard Medical School from 1987 to 1995 and at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1990 to 1995.
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Peter Frishauf
Peter Frishauf started his career as a medical writer in 1972 after graduating from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Since then he has founded two successful medical information companies, SCP Communications in 1982, and Medscape in 1995. He served as Medscape's CEO until February, 1998 when he became Chairman of its Executive Committee and was a member of its Board of Directors through its IPO and until its merger with MedicaLogic/Medscape, Inc in May, 2000. MedicaLogic sold Medscape to WebMD in the final days of December, 2001, and Peter left the enterprise in 2002. SCP was acquired by CMP Healthcare Media in 2004. Peter is now an independent consultant.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Andrew Hessel
Andrew Hessel is a genomic scientist and consultant in DNA technologies. Andrew’s work is empowering a new generation of young Canadian researchers to tackle big biology-related problems like sustainable fuel production, environmental cleanup, superbugs and cancer. He is a strong supporter of open source biology for accelerating innovation and as a counterbalance to proprietary, profit-driven biotechnology R&D. In 2008, Andrew launched an Alberta-based open source biotechnology venture that aims to begin development of personalized, affordable medicines for breast cancer.
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Jay Keasling
Coming soon.
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Stefan Larsson
Stefan is a Parner of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the leader of
its Nordic Health care Practice group and the Global leader of BCG's
Scientist network.
The Boston Consulting Group is a global Management Consulting firm and
a leader in the field of Health care Strategy. Stefan joined BCG 1996
and has advised clients across the Health care industry covering both
strategy and operational improvement projects. His focus has been
Pharma with projects througout the value chain from Preclinical and
Clinical Development, Inlicensing and Manufacturing to Sales Force
Effectiveness. He has lead over 40 Due diligence projects for European
Private Equity clients. He has lead stategy and operational
Effectiveness projects for public and private provider organizations
and a range of projects in the MedTech industry. A group of projects
have focussed on public health eg in the field of Malaria as well as
national or regional Health care strategy for public authorities.
Stefan is the proud father of two teen-agers and spends his past time
with wife and friends enjoying art, good food/wine and music. Stefan
is an MD from the Karolinska Institute. He did his PhD at the
Karolinska Institute and Harvard Medical School and PosDoc at the MRC
Human Genetics unit in Edinburgh and at the EMBL in Heidelberg.
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John-Michael Lind
John-Michael Lind, Trustee, The Lind Family Trust. Joined Ashmore in 2008 to set up and head the Ashmore India office, bringing 14 years of on-the-ground asset management and investment banking experience in India. Prior to Ashmore, he founded and ran Strategic Partners, a US-India boutique advisory and investment firm managing proprietary capital based in Bombay. Prior to Strategic Partners, he was for three years the initial CEO of Tata Telecom Maharashtra (formerly Hughes Ispat), the basic telecom license holder for Maharashtra and Karnataka. Before moving to India, he was a senior associate at White & Case for two years in London and New York. John-Michael started his career as a vice president at Salomon Brothers in New York and an associate at O'Sullivan Graev & Karabell. He is a founding member of the ACCESS Health Initiative.
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Julie C. Muraco
Julie C. Muraco, Managing Partner, Praeditis Group LLC, is a consultant working with private companies and fund groups seeking access to global public and private capital sources, as well as, providing operational expertise in strategic planning, sales & marketing and corporate communications. She founded Praeditis Group LLC, a capital markets and corporate advisory firm in 2008.
Prior to founding Praeditis Group, Ms. Muraco was a Senior Managing Director and head of Global Capital Markets for The NASDAQ OMX Stock Market. She was responsible for strategy and client relations with corporate advisors, such as investment banks and financial sponsors, transitioning private companies to the public markets. She had been with the NASDAQ Stock Market since February, 2004.
Ms. Muraco spent more than 20 years on Wall Street as a vice president with J.P. Morgan’s Cash Markets Division, based in New York, and as a managing director in the Capital Markets Division of Smith Barney, based in Chicago and earlier in Cleveland. She has extensive experience with institutional investment firms and advisors throughout the U.S., Canada and Asia, and has been involved with public company investments since 1980.
Ms. Muraco spent two years as vice president, Investor Relations, for Archstone-Smith, a publicly traded REIT specializing in luxury high-rise apartments.
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Jordan Schreiber
Global Life Sciences Markets Leader
Ernst & Young, LLP
Scott serves in the role of Markets Leader within Ernst & Young’s Global Life Sciences Center. In this role, Scott is responsible for all aspects of the firm's global marketing, communication and go-to-market strategies for the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medtech industries. Mr. Sarazen and the marketing team serve as the primary conduit between the firm and the life science industries for the purposes of tracking the changing landscape of these dynamic sectors and communicating E&Y’s proven value proposition.
Mr. Sarazen has enjoyed over 20 years of experience working directly and indirectly in the life science industries. Prior to joining EY in 2006, Scott’s career has included roles in biopharmaceutical facilities design, strategic operations and business development in positions as: Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at Straumann, North America and Director of Global Planning and Development at Genzyme Corporation. Scott has also served in public economic development roles, advocating for the expansion of the biomedical industries, as the Senior Vice President for Life Sciences with MassDevelopment for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and as a special consultant to the Chief Economic Development Officer for the City of Boston.
Mr. Sarazen holds a Bachelors of Science in Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a Masters of Science in Management from Lesley University.
In addition to other affiliations, Scott serves on the: Advisory Board of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST); Board of Trustees for the KIPP Academy in Lynn, MA; the Advisory Board for the City of Boston’s Life-Tech Initiative; Advisory Board for Boston World Partnerships; and on the Economic Development Committee at the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council.
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Jordan Schreiber
Investment manager of Princeton Capital Management. Previously, for 25 years, managed Merrill Lynch/BlackRock Global Healthcare Fund. More than 41 years of institutional healthcare invesment experience. Chartered Financial Analyst. PhD from New York University, MBA from Harvard Business School, BBS from Oklahoma University.
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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.
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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 »
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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.
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Hans Wigzell
Born 1938. MD, Ph. D. Professor Immunology. Board member of Biovitrum since 2004. Chairman of Biovitrum Scientific Advisory Board since 2001. Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. President of Karolinska Institutet 1995-2003. Member of the Board of the Karolinska Development AB (Chairman) RaySearch AB, Probi AB, Intercell AG and Vibratech.