Scientific advisory board

Prof. Dr. Bhatia is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor at MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). Prof. Dr. Bhatia is the Director of the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine, and a member of the Ludwig Center for Molecular Oncology. She is also an Affiliated Faculty member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, an Institute Member of the Broad Institute, a Biomedical Engineer at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital, and has been elected to Brown University’s Board of Trustees.

Trained as both a physician and engineer Prof. Dr. Bhatia’s laboratory is dedicated to leveraging miniaturization tools used in semiconductor manufacturing to impact human health. Using micro and nanotechnologies, also called “tiny technologies,” her lab aims to interface with living and synthetic systems to improve medical diagnostics, as well as drug delivery, tissue degeneration, and disease modelling.  Her work has been profiled broadly such as in Scientific American, the Boston Globe, BBC News, TED and TEDMED, Popular Science, Huffington Post, Forbes, PBS’s NOVA scienceNOW, the Economist, and MSNBC.

Prof. Dr. Gabizon is founder, CEO and Chief Scientist of LipoMedix, and is Professor of Oncology and Chairman at Shaare Zedek Medical Center, of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a renowned scientist and clinician in the field of nanomedicine and cancer therapy. He has been awarded several prizes, among which the Alec Bangham Lifetime Achievement Award and the Kaye Innovation Award. He has been the recipient of several ICRF grants, has received an ICRF Research Career Development Award, and has been the recipient of a prestigious ICRF Research Professorship since 2008. As co-inventor and co-developer of Doxil^® and Promitil^®, Prof. Gabizon was key for the successful development and clinical implementation of liposomal drugs.

Prof. Gabizon holds an MD degree from the University of Granada in Spain, and a PhD degree from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

Dr. Joost Holthuis, an entrepreneur in the life sciences, is a co-founder and former CEO of Cristal Therapeutics. Dr. Holthuis started his career in 1988 at Chiron in analytical and product development. He subsequently founded OctoPlus in 1995 where he was the CEO for 14 years. During that time, he built up and successfully listed the company on Euronext. OctoPlus was acquired by Dr. Reddy’s in 2013.

In 2010 he became involved in Cristal Therapeutics. He is active in the board of various start-up companies and has been involved in BioGenerationVentures as venture partner for over 8 years.

Dr. Holthuis received an M.Sc. in Pharmaceutical Sciences and a Pharmacist degree from the University of Leiden and he holds a Ph.D. from the University of Utrecht.

Dr. Hora has served the biopharmaceutical industry for more than 30 years with demonstrated leadership in process, analytical and pharmaceutical sciences, manufacturing and quality functions. Dr. Hora has been part of teams that have successfully filed 50+ INDs and registered 11 biopharmaceutical products worldwide. Prior to joining Amunix, Dr. Hora was the Chief Technical Operations Officer at Nektar Therapeutics spearheading strategic direction and execution of all process and product development as well as manufacturing activities. Dr. Hora joined Nektar in 2010 as Senior Vice President, Pharmaceutical Development and Manufacturing Operations.  Prior to Nektar, Dr. Hora served as Vice President of Product Operations & Quality at Facet Biotech/ PDL BioPharma (now a part of Abbvie) from 2006-10 and Vice President of Process and Product Development at Chiron Corporation (now Novartis) from 2001-06.  He held positions of increasing responsibilities at Chiron, Pfizer and GSK in the preceding years. Dr. Hora received his Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bioengineering (Materials) in 1980 and held a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Washington, Seattle. Dr. Hora holds 23 US Patents and has authored scores of publications and delivered numerous presentations in international forums. He serves on the Scientific Advisory Board for Cristal Therapeutics, an emerging nanotechnology-based biopharmaceutical company.

Prof. Dr. Lammers is an expert in drug targeting, image-guided drug delivery, tumour-targeted combination therapies and imaging. He started as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Pharmaceutics at Utrecht University, and was appointed group leader at the Department of Experimental Molecular Imaging at RWTH Aachen University and at the Helmholtz Center for Biomedical Engineering in 2009. He also serves as assistant professor at the Department of Targeted Therapeutics at the University of Twente. Prof. Lammers studied Pharmacy at the University of Utrecht.

He holds a DSc degree in Radiation Oncology from Heidelberg University and a PhD degree in Pharmaceutics from Utrecht University.

Prof. Dr. Liskamp is an international expert in synthesis of biologically active modified peptides and peptidomimetics, dendrimers, peptide folding, protein mimics including synthetic antibodies and vaccines. He started his scientific career at The Institute of Cancer Research, Department of Chemistry at Columbia University, New York. He was assistant professor at the University of Leiden and visiting professor at the University of California in Los Angeles. Thereafter, he served as associate professor at Utrecht University and was appointed professor of Molecular Medicinal Chemistry in 1996. He was visiting professor at the Universities of Leeds and Glasgow and became professor and chair of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Glasgow in 2013.

Prof. Liskamp holds a PhD in bio-organic chemistry from the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

Prof. Dr. Ernst Wagner is Chair of Pharmaceutical Biology and Biotechnology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich and a member of the Center for Nanoscience (CeNS). He coordinates ‘Biomedical Nanotechnologies’ of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Nanosystems Initiative Munich (NIM)’.

His current research focuses on precise sequence-defined drug and protein carriers, and receptor-targeted delivery of nucleic acid therapeutics including pDNA, siRNA, or microRNA.  The biomedical focus resides on tumor-targeted delivery and therapy, overcoming mechanisms of chemoresistance. Previously he was Director of Cancer Vaccines at Boehringer Ingelheim Austria, and a Group Leader at the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), Vienna University Biocenter.

He holds a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the Technical University of Vienna, Austria.

Prof. Dr. Ernst Wagner has authored ≥397 publications (current h-index 70).

In 2017 he was elected into the European Academy of Sciences.