Tim Van Hauwermeiren co-founded argenx in 2008 and has served as its Chief Executive Officer since April 2008. He has served as a member of its board of directors since July 2014. Mr. Van Hauwermeiren has more than 20 years of general management and business development experience across the life sciences and consumer goods sectors. Mr. Van Hauwermeiren holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in bioengineering from Ghent University (Belgium) and an Executive MBA from The Vlerick School of Management.

Dr. Prabhavathi Fernandes has more than 35 years of pharmaceutical discovery, development and management experience in large and small pharmaceutical companies. She obtained her undergraduate and Master’s degree training in India, worked at the University of Ghent, Belgium, in Immunochemistry, received her Ph.D. in Microbiology from Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, and completed post-doctoral fellowship in Clinical and Public Health Microbiology. Dr. Fernandes held executive leadership positions at pharmaceutical corporations including Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceutical Research Institute where she was a vice-president in Drug Discovery, Abbott Laboratories, where she was the leader of Anti-infective Discovery and The Squibb Institute for Medical Research. She was directly involved in the development of antibiotics, six of which have been approved. After leaving Bristol- Myers Squibb, she has founded and led four biotechnology and CRO companies as President, Chief Executive Officer and Director of each of these companies. Prior to her retirement in December 2016, she led Cempra, Inc. for 12 years as its founder, CEO and chief scientist and developed solithromycin and fusidic acid. Dr. Fernandes has served on the U.S. Congressional Panel for Assessment of Impact of Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria and on the American Society for Microbiology Advisory Panel for Antibiotic Resistance. She has authored over 250 publications and several reviews, book chapters and served as an editor for books.

Dr. Joseph B. Bolen Ph.D. is Chief Scientific Officer at PureTech Health, a leading biotechnology company listed on the London Stock Exchange and part of the FTSE 250 Index, which develops medicines to combat serious diseases. Dr Bolen has more than 30 years of industry and research experience and has been at the forefront of cancer and immunology research. Before joining PureTech Health, Dr. Bolen oversaw all aspects of research and development for Moderna Therapeutics as president and chief scientific officer. Previously, he was chief scientific officer and global head of oncology research at Millennium: The Takeda Oncology Company. Prior to joining Millennium in 1999, Dr Bolen held senior R&D positions at Hoechst Marion Roussel, Schering-Plough and Bristol-Myers Squibb. He began his career at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where he contributed to the discovery of a class of proteins known as tyrosine kinase oncogenes as key regulators of the immune system. Dr Bolen graduated from the University of Nebraska with a BS degree in microbiology and chemistry and a PhD in immunology and conducted his postdoctoral training in molecular virology at the Kansas State University Cancer Center.

John de Koning, PhD is partner at EQT Life Sciences, formerly LSP, one of Europe’s largest and most experienced healthcare investors, targeting innovative life sciences and health care companies. In addition to Aelin Therapeutics, John currently serves on the boards of ONWARD Medical (Euronext: ONWD), eTheRNA, VarmX, Visus Therapeutics and Xilis. He also served on the boards of several other companies, such as argenx (NASDAQ: ARGX), Merus (NASDAQ: MRUS), BMEYE (acquired by Edwards Lifesciences) and Prosensa (acquired by BioMarin). Prior to joining EQT in 2006, John was the Managing Director of Semaia Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Hybrigenics). Previously, he was a senior researcher within several prestigious medical research labs and worked with, among others, Prof. Hans Clevers, Prof. Bob Löwenberg and Prof. Allan Balmain. John has a Master’s degree in Medical Biology from the University of Utrecht and a PhD in Oncology from the Erasmus University Rotterdam, both in the Netherlands. After obtaining his PhD, he received a prestigious fellowship from the Dutch Cancer Society to work at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center in San Francisco. His results were published in numerous leading scientific journals, including Nature Genetics.

Frank is the Global Head of the Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund. He served as board member of STAT Diagnostica (acquired by Qiagen in 2018), Hookipa Biotech (IPO at NASDAQ in 2019) and Amal Therapeutics (acquired by Boehringer Ingelheim in 2019). Currently, he is on the Boards of eTheRNA, Aelin Therapeutics, RinRi Therapeutics, Acousia Therapeutics, and Brainomix. Frank is a physician by training did his PhD in Pharmacology and specialized in Pharmacology and Toxicology. He spent more than 10 years in academic research in the Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin and in the Institute of Pharmacology of the Freie Universität, Berlin. He began his industrial career at Schering AG and moved in 1999 to Boehringer Ingelheim joining Pulmonary Research. In 2005, he took over the responsibility for the Licensing Department. In this function, he was responsible for the licensing activities of the German Boehringer Ingelheim organization in various indication areas. In addition, he built up the Biological Research unit at the German Research site in Biberach. In 2010 - shortly after its initiation - Frank joined the Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund.

Dr. Roychowdhury is a hematologist/oncologist with over a decade of patient care, academic research and teaching experience as well as over 15 years of pharmaceutical industry and senior management experience. He is a leader in the pharmaceutical industry across multiple functional and cross-functional areas, regions and matrices, including – all stages of R&D, regulatory, commercial operations and medical affairs, market access, business development and alliance management. During his career in the top 10 pharmaceutical companies, Dr. Roychowdhury was the Senior VP and Head of the Global Oncology Division at Sanofi. Prior to that, he served as the VP for Clinical Development at GlaxoSmithKline and directed the Oncology global regulatory group at Eli Lilly and Company. Among many other achievements, Debasish career includes 9 drug approvals in the U.S. and in Europe, the establishment of Sanofi’s Oncology Division (notably Genzyme’s integration), founding Partner Therapeutics and successfully supporting biotech companies (notably Seragon Pharmaceuticals sale to Roche/Genentech). Debasish serves as non-executive boardmember of Aelin Therapeutics.

Bart De Taeye is Investment Manager in the Life Sciences & Care team at PMV. He holds a PharmD and PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences, has more than 20 years of research experience including 15 years related to drug discovery, and more than 7 years experience with business development and company creation. Bart graduated from the KU Leuven where he also obtained a Postgraduate degree in Business Economics to complement his scientific background. After a postdoc and assistant professorship at Vanderbilt University and Northwestern University, focusing on a better understanding of and the development of novel treatments for the metabolic syndrome, Bart joined reMYND in 2011 as a Project Leader Drug Discovery, to build a diabetes drug discovery platform. Driven by his interest to advance innovative science to applications with societal impact, Bart became a Search and Evaluation Lead at Cistim in 2014, to scout for innovative technologies, while also managing contractual relationships. In 2018, Bart joined VIB as Business Development Manager to support the translation of VIB’s research, where he supported various drug discovery projects, the creation of new VIB spin-off companies and closing of licensing deals.

Griet Vanpoucke, PhD, is Head New Ventures at VIB. With her team she translates exciting science from the research institute into successful novel ventures. She currently also serves as non-exec Director on the Board of Orionis Biosciences. Previously she was part of Pronota, a biomarker discovery and diagnostics start-up company. As Director R&D she was responsible for several internal and partnered biomarker discovery programs. She played a leading role in the companies transformation from a proteomics discovery company to a diagnostic product company, up and till the company was acquired in 2014. She holds a PhD in Biotechnology from Ghent University and did a postdoc at the MRC in Edinburgh, UK.

Els Beirnaert, PhD, brings along 18 years of experience in drug development, venture and business development. Previously she was one of the start-up pioneers of Ablynx leading multidisciplinary project teams and translating drug development projects from discovery to pre-clinical development to clinical development (phase 1 and phase 2a). She was Head of New Ventures at VIB responsible for the establishment of start-up/spin-out companies in life sciences. She served in the board of directors of Confo Therapeutics, Q-Biologicals and Multiplicom. Dr. Beirnaert obtained a Master in Biotechnology at the University of Ghent and a PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Antwerp.

Frederic Rousseau and Joost Schymkowitz are a scientific duo since 1998. They both obtained their PhD in 2001 from the University of Cambridge (UK) where they used protein engineering methods to study mechanisms of protein folding. They then moved to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg (Germany) where they contributed to the development of several structural bioinformatics tools to predict mutational effect on protein stability and aggregation (FoldX and TANGO). They are currently group leaders at the KU Leuven-VIB Centre for Brain & Disease Research where they conduct research on mechanisms of protein misfolding and aggregation in disease. They developed several technology platforms manipulating protein aggregation either to inhibit protein aggregation or to design synthetic amyloid peptides with biological activity.

Frederic Rousseau and Joost Schymkowitz are a scientific duo since 1998. They both obtained their PhD in 2001 from the University of Cambridge (UK) where they used protein engineering methods to study mechanisms of protein folding. They then moved to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg (Germany) where they contributed to the development of several structural bioinformatics tools to predict mutational effect on protein stability and aggregation (FoldX and TANGO). They are currently group leaders at the KU Leuven-VIB Centre for Brain & Disease Research where they conduct research on mechanisms of protein misfolding and aggregation in disease. They developed several technology platforms manipulating protein aggregation either to inhibit protein aggregation or to design synthetic amyloid peptides with biological activity.

Prof. Sheena Radford graduated with a BSc in Biochemistry at the University of Birmingham, completed a PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge with Professor R.N. Perham, FRS, and held various postdoctoral posts and a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Molecular Sciences. Afterwards she joined the University of Leeds in 1995 as a Lecturer in the School of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, progressing to Reader in 1998 and Professor in 2000. In 2009 she became the Deputy Director of the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology, and Director in 2012 (until 2021). Areas of her scientific expertise are protein folding & misfolding, protein aggregation and disease, amyloidosis; folding and chaperoning of outer membrane proteins and aggregation of biologics. Since 2021 she is the Astbury Professor of Biophysics and a Royal Society Professor.

Prof. Daniel Otzen obtained his PhD in Protein Biophysics at Aarhus University and the University of Cambridge. Currently he is professor of nanobiotechnology, iNANO at the Department of Molecular Biology, Aarhus University. He has more than 20 years of research experience in the field of protein sciences where his major areas of scientific expertise are pathological and functional fibrillation and aggregation of proteins, looking at protein stability and formulation, protein-surfactant and protein-lipid interactions, and biophysics of membrane proteins, including stability and mechanism of insertion, folding and association in lipid bilayers and detergent micelles. He is reviewer for >50 different journals, editor of Biochimica et Biophysica Acta and Biophysical Chemistry. Since 2013 he is a member of the Danish Research Council (FNU – Natural Sciences).

Cláudio M. Gomes is Associate Professor (Agregado) at the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department at the Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon where he heads the Protein Misfolding and Amyloids in Biomedicine Laboratory at BioISI Biosystems & Integrative Sciences Institute. He graduated in Chemistry and Biotechnology at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, joined the Gulbenkian PhD program in Biology and Medicine and got a PhD degree in biochemistry at ITQB (1999) and habilitation in Biochemistry in the specialty of Structural Biochemistry (in 2013). He is a Biochemist specialised in protein folding, structural biochemistry and biophysics, and the scientific activity of his laboratory is focused on investigating protein folding diseases, the biochemistry of neurodegeneration and mechanisms of amyloid formation. He regularly serves as international expert project reviewer for national funding agencies, the European Commission and foundations and as Editor and peer-reviewer for international scientific journals.