Board of Directors

John Berriman (Chairman) is the Chairman of Algeta ASA and a member of the board of directors of MicroMet Inc, Ablynx nv and Oxxon Therapeutics Holdings Inc. Previously, he was a director of Abingworth Management, where he was involved in the founding, financing and serving as director of several biotechnology companies in Europe and in the US, many of which obtained listings on public stock exchanges. Prior to that Mr Berriman spent 14 years with Celltech Group. He was on the board of Celltech Group when it listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1994. and whilst at Celltech he founded Celltech Biologics and became the business director of Celltech Therapeutics. He has also served on the boards of Solexa Ltd (director and co-founder), Chroma Therapeutics Ltd (Chairman), Epigenomics AG, Alnylam Inc, and XCounter AB. John Berriman holds a chemical engineering degree from the University of Cambridge and an MBA from the London Business School.

Nick McCooke (CEO) was previously CEO of Solexa (NASDAQ: SLXA), the developer of ultra-throughput DNA sequencing technology, which he took from university spinout in 2000 to the reverse takeover of a NASDAQ listed company in 2005. During that period, he raised nearly $40M in venture capital funding. Now headquartered in California, the company has recently announced its proposed sale to Illumina for $600 million. Previously he was President of Rapigene Inc, Seattle, USA, one of the first wave of SNP genotyping companies, which he sold to Qiagen NV at the end of 1999. Prior to this he held several general management roles in Innovex (now part of Quintiles Inc). These included the green-field start-up of a pharma contract sales organization (CSO) in Japan. As a member of the Innovex core general management team he contributed to the value creation that led to its trade sale to Quintiles for around $800 million. He began his biotech career with Celltech where he held a number of commercial management positions. He holds BSc and MSc degrees in engineering and an MBA from the London Business School.

Koen Kas (CSO) was, prior to founding Pronota, the Director of Drug Discovery at the Belgian-Dutch functional genomics company Galapagos Genomics. Previously, he set up and headed the cancer drug discovery program at Tibotec. After the merger with Virco, he also became in charge of Virco’s Oncology Diagnostics program. Before that, in 1999 he was appointed professor at the University of Leuven and lecturer at Harvard University, Boston, USA following postdoctoral research at a number of prestigious institutes. Koen Kas is a guest professor at the University of Ghent, Belgium and Chairman of the scientific committee of the European Cancer Prevention Organisation. He received his PhD degree in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Antwerp, where he also obtained a degree in Business Administration.

Rudy Dekeyser (non-executive director) is vice general director of VIB (Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology) and manager of VIB’s technology transfer department. He has been board member at Devgen and CropDesign and is board member at Ablynx, Cardio³, Pronota, Actogenix, EMBLEM (the EMBL tech transfer company), FlandersBio (the Flemish biotech cluster) and the Center for Agricultural Research. He is also co-founding board member of the European Association of European Science and Technology Transfer Professionals (ASTP) and guest professor “innovation management” at the Ghent University. Dr. Dekeyser obtained his PhD in biology at the University of Ghent.

John de Koning (non-executive director) joined LSP in 2006. John started his career as a project leader at the biotech company Semaia Pharmaceuticals in Utrecht, the Netherlands. In 2003, Semaia Pharmaceuticals was acquired by Hybrigenics (F), and John became Director of Target Discovery and then Managing Director of Semaia. In addition, John was a member of the management team responsible for technology transfer at a large oncology consortium of leading Dutch scientists funded by the Dutch government, called the Cancer Genomics Center. This is a center of excellence of the Netherlands Genomics Initiative. John has a Masters degree in molecular biology from the University of Utrecht and a PhD in oncology from the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. After his PhD, John received a prestigious fellowship from the Dutch Cancer Society to work at the UCSF Cancer Center in San Francisco. His results were published in numerous leading scientific journals, including Nature Genetics. In addition to these achievements, John is inventor on several patents.

Jim Van heusden (non-executive director) is a senior investment manager at GIMV and focuses on investments in Life Sciences.  He currently serves on the board of Actogenix (Belgium) and has been a board member at CropDesign (acquired by BASF). Prior to joining GIMV in 2001, he was working as a senior scientist at the department of Oncology Drug Discovery at Janssen Pharmaceutica, a Johnson & Johnson company, where he also served on the research management committee of the collaboration with Rigel Pharmaceuticals (US).  He holds BSc and MSc degrees in chemistry and biochemistry from the University of Antwerp (Belgium) and a PhD in molecular and cellular biology from the University of Maastricht (The Netherlands).

Ruth Devenyns is Investment Director at KBC Private Equity and has a Masters Degree in Applied Economics (Ghent University, 1986). She joined KBC Bank's Economic Research Department in 1986, where she covered several industries including the chemical & pharmaceutical industry. In 1992, she moved to the bank's Corporate Finance Department. In 1995, she was asked to start up KBC Securities' equity research team, where she gradually specialized in biotechnology. She was actively involved in a number of IPO's and private placements. In 2001, Ruth moved to the buy side and is currently managing KBC Private Equity's investments.