Executive Management

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. The company was acquired by Illumina in 2007 for $600 million and is the dominant player in the next generation sequencing market. 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.