Dr. David Selwood is a professor of biological and medicinal chemistry at the University College London and the Head of Biological and Medicinal Chemistry at the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research.
He researches the edge of chemistry and biology using the latest techniques and developing new ones for studying biological systems. His lab utilizes computational molecular design in many aspects.
Prof. Dr. Stefan Knapp joined Frankfurt University (Germany) in 2015 as a Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and the Buchmann Institute of Molecular Life Sciences. He is associated to the Structural Genomics Consortia (SGC) as a visiting Professor at Oxford and an adjunct Professor at George Washington University. Since 2017 he has been the CSO of the newly founded SGC node at the Goethe-University Frankfurt. His research interests are the rational design of selective inhibitors that target protein kinases and protein interactions.
Peter received his B.A. in biology from The Johns Hopkins University and his M.D. and Ph.D. (pharmacology) degrees from Yale University, then completed a pediatrics residency at The Children’s Hospital of Boston followed by clinical fellowships in pediatric hematology/oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and in clinical oncology and regulatory sciences jointly through the U.S. FDA and the NCI.
He began his career in drug discovery and development at the Investigational Drug Branch of the Cancer Therapy Evaluation Program, NCI followed by positions of increasing responsibility at Novartis and DuPont Pharmaceuticals. He subsequently served as Senior VP of the Oncology Center of Excellence in Drug Discovery at GlaxoSmithKline and VP of Oncology Clinical Development at Johnson and Johnson. In 2010, he co-founded BeiGene Ltd. and served as President. Most recently, he served as Chief Medical Officer at Epizyme Inc. and then at Boston Pharmaceuticals both of which are based in Cambridge, MA. Over his career, he has been directly responsible for the first-time-in-human dosing of 19 anticancer agents and has overseen the development of over 60 hematology and oncology compounds in all phases of clinical trials. His work has contributed to eleven NCE or biologics approvals to date: Gleevec®; Arranon®; Tykerb®; Promacta®; Votrient®; Synribo®; Tafinlar®; Mekinist®; Sylvant®; and Rydap®, and Tazverik®.
Christopher Trummer is CEO and Co-Founder of Celeris Therapeutics.
Through his professional experience, he has a strong network in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry.
He is responsible for the technical lead, at the intersection of tech and chemistry for all development processes as well as technology partnerships. He has been an invited speaker in AI for drug discovery conferences several times and is co-author of peer-reviewed publications in various journals.
Christopher holds a degree in molecular biology and biotechnology with honors from TU Graz and KFU Graz. Besides, he completed his Master’s degree in information systems at IU in Bad Honnef.
Petr Sramek has been a serial entrepreneur in DeepTech for more than 30 years. Petr builds science, funding, and business infrastructure to support the faster adoption of technologies to improve health. Petr was Entrepreneur in Residence at Singularity University, Co-Founder of the Artificial Intelligence Platform at the Confederation of Industry, and Senator for the Czech Republic in the World Business Angels Investment Forum (WBAF).
Petr is also the founder of the AI Awards project. Petr was listed in the group of 28 AI leaders in the World Intellectual Property Organization’s flagship study alongside Nick Bostrom, Frank Chen, Martin Ford, Kai-Fu Lee, Andrew Ng, Ben Lorica, and others.
Petr is Co-Founder, Chairman of the Board, and Managing Partner of Longevitytech.fund, a Czech VC.
Noah is the Chief Technology Officer of Celeris Therapeutics.
While graduating in applied mathematics and data science at the Technical University of Vienna, he became a Kaggle grandmaster proving excellence and discipline in global data science competitions.
With his extensive knowledge and experience in machine learning, from research to operations, he’s a lecturer at the Technical University of Vienna and the University of Applied Sciences Vienna.
Nick is VP, Head of Partnerships at Celeris Therapeutics. He gained experience setting up computationally-enabled drug discovery collaborations and commercial agreements as a Partnering Executive at Atomwise. He also managed a commercialization grant program which included drug discovery and development efforts at the University of Michigan Medical School. He holds an MsE from the University of Michigan in Entrepreneurship, with a focus on bioinformatics.
Markus received his Ph.D. in Life Sciences in 2007 at the Institute of Medicinal Chemistry, University of Vienna. He then did his postdoc with BROAD Institute alumni Sebastian Nijman at the Center for Molecular Medicine (CeMM) in Vienna on functional genetic drug screening.
After several high-impact publications on cancer vulnerabilities, he switched from academia to Biotech, where he ultimately joined the leadership team at PhoreMost Ltd. in Cambridge, UK – starting as Assoc. Director R&D and ending at Chief Technology Officer (CTO). At PhoreMost, he hired, shaped, and directed the R&D team, set up the SiteSeeker screening technology, Targeted Degradation technology, and analysis pipeline (both wet lab and dry lab). He oversaw and managed internal and external projects (i.e., with Pharma partners & clients) covering cancer and other disease areas, fundraising, and business development.
Friedrich is our VP Drug Discovery and has more than 25 years of experience in medicinal and computational chemistry. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1992 at the Marburg University in organic chemistry and worked for small and big pharma and biotech companies, leading teams of up to 40 people, and already successfully brought a drug to the market. His vast experience covers all stages in drug discovery, including CRO activities, out-, and in-licensing.
Marius Swart has over 20 years of innovation and financial investment experience. He is a co-founder, angel investor, and worked at Coca-Cola and Henkel in operating roles as well as investment partner for their early stage venture capital arms.
He is currently a board member on several start-ups, advising them on financing and growth strategies and also a member of the World Economic Forum’s Executive Group, Digital Platforms and Ecosystems.
From 2018 to Sept 2021, he worked at Henkel and managed the ±EUR100mm venture arm for the consumer facing businesses. Prior to Henkel, he worked at The Coca-Cola Company for 14 years where he held several positions in finance and operations including 4 years in M&A. During the last 7 years in venture, he has invested in ±40 start ups in several verticals.
Karel Kubias is an experienced leader in Life Sciences, chemical, and pharmaceutical businesses with more than 25 years of experience.
Karel studied chemistry at TH Merseburg, Germany, and holds an MBA from Auburn University.
He worked for five years as the CEO of Merck spol. s.r.o., Czech Republic, before becoming the Regional Head Eastern Europe, Middle East & Africa at Merck Millipore, division of Merck KGaA Darmstadt, for another five years.
Karel, Partner in the i&i Biotech Fund, joins the Board of Directors at Celeris Therapeutics.
Hosein Fooladi is Chief Data Scientist and one of the first employees of Celeris Therapeutics. He holds a degree in Biomedical Engineering. Hosein was honored by the Iranian Ministry of Science and Research as an exceptional talent after being ranked in the top 0.1% in the national licensing exams.
Since 2017, Hosein has worked at Cambridge Systems Biology Center as a Machine Learning Researcher in Drug Discovery. After this role, he became a Senior Data Scientist for cheminformatics at an in silico drug discovery and design company based in Cambridge.
Hosein is responsible for the intersections of chemistry, biology and machine learning research. Hosein gained our attention through his peer-reviewed publications on deep learning and drug discovery.
Jakob has co-founded several tech companies over the past few years, covering a wide variety of areas from marketing, to sales, business management, and product development.
While he was active in various markets, high technology was always the common denominator, including artificial intelligence and natural language processing.
Before co-founding Celeris Therapeutics, he was Head of Sales of an international venture building company in Switzerland.
Jakob is responsible for finance, operations, investments, marketing, and sales.
Ronjon Nag is a British-American inventor and entrepreneur specializing in the field of mobile technology. He co-founded the technology company Lexicus, which was acquired by Motorola in 1993. His later co-founded company Cellmania was acquired by Research in Motion in 2010. He later served as vice president at both Motorola and BlackBerry.
Ronjon is the founder and president of R42, a U.S. VC group. He was one of the early investors in Healx and Oxford Drug Design.
Johannes Kirchmair is Associate Professor of cheminformatics at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Vienna and Head of the Computational Drug Discovery and Design Group (COMP3D).
He is also a group leader at the Center for Bioinformatics (ZBH) at the University of Hamburg. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Innsbruck (2007), Johannes started his career as an application scientist at Inte:Ligand GmbH (Vienna) and as a university assistant at his alma mater. In 2010, he moved to BASF SE (Ludwigshafen) as a postdoctoral fellow. He then worked as a research associate at the University of Cambridge (2010-2013) and ETH Zurich (2013-2014). Johannes held an assistant professorship in applied bioinformatics at the University of Hamburg (2014 to 2018) and an associate professorship in bioinformatics at the University of Bergen (2018 to 2019).
He has been a visiting professor at the National Institute of Warangal (2016), at the University of Cagliari (2017), and the University of Vienna (2018). His main research interests include the development and application of computational methods to predict the biological activities, metabolic activities, and toxicity of small molecules (including natural products) in the context of drug discovery.
Günter Klambauer is Assistant Professor for Machine Learning in the field of drug discovery at the Institute for Machine Learning at JKU in Linz. He also leads the research group on AI and Drug Discovery.
His main research interests are self-normalizing neural networks, convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks and reinforcement learning, machine learning methods for drug discovery, and life science data analysis and bioinformatics. After his diploma studies in mathematics and biology and teaching positions at BORG Linz and BORG Bad Leonfelden, Günter pursued graduate studies in bioinformatics and did his doctoral thesis with Sepp Hochreiter at JKU.
Günter has received several awards for his scientific excellence, including the Austrian Life Science Award and the Award of Excellence of the Austrian Ministry of Science.
Ola Spjuth is a professor at Uppsala University focusing on mathematical and statistical modeling, informatics, and quantitative analysis of pharmacological systems. He has developed methods, algorithms, and software to study and model pharmaceutical interactions.
A major focus of his group is how artificial intelligence and machine learning can aid the drug discovery process: for example, in drug screening and the study of drug toxicity, metabolism, and resistance.
His group combines in silico and in vitro experiments at the cellular level and has access to a robotic high-content imaging laboratory connected to a modern IT infrastructure to manage and analyze large amounts of data.
Jean-Louis Reymond is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Bern, Switzerland. He studied chemistry and biochemistry at the ETH Zurich and received his Ph.D. from the University of Lausanne on the synthesis of natural products (1989).
After a post-doc and an assistant professorship at the Scripps Research Institute, he moved to the University of Bern (1997). His research focuses on the recognition and representation of the chemical space for small molecule drug discovery, the synthesis of new molecules from GDB (http://gdb.unibe.ch), and the design and synthesis of peptide dendrimers and polycyclic peptides as antimicrobial agents and for nucleic acid transport. He is the author of > 300 scientific publications and reviews (h = 62).
Siham Ceballos is an international medical executive with more than 17 years of experience in biotech and pharma industry and VC-backed start-ups.
Among other achievements, Siham set up and led international medical organizations for several biotechs at their start-up stage in Europe, including Celgene, Alnylam, and Mayne Pharma. She more recently contributed to the inception and was the COO of Rejuveron Life Sciences.
Siham holds a Master in Cellular and Molecular Physiopathology and a Ph.D. in Cancer Cellular and Molecular Biology from the University of Pierre and Marie Curie, Paris. She earned an executive MBA in ESSEC Business School, Paris.
Stephan Winkler is a FH-Professor and Program Director at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria in the field of Medical- and Bioinformatics. He is also Head of the Department of Medical- and Bioinformatics, and Data Science at University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria.
After receiving his doctorate from Johannes Kepler University (2008), Stephan started his career at University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, as FH-Professor for Medical- and Bioinformatics. In the course of his work, he was awarded several times, among others as the best lecturer of the UAS Upper Austria.