Technology & Science Advisory Board

José de Chastonay (1954), Dr. Phil. Nat. & MBA. Dr. de Chastonay is a strategic thinker and successful senior executive with decades of experience as a successful leader of Contract Manufacturing Organizations and Biotechnology companies. He has held various Board level positions and served as CEO of Irvine Scientific and as Corporate Executive Committee Member of Bachem Holding as well as President and COO of Bachem Americas. Furthermore, he worked on buy side and sell side mandates with Wombat Capital, facilitating cross border M&A activities, predominantly in the CDMO space.

His industrial career commenced with Ares Serono SA, where he established cell banks and processes for human recombinant proteins and worked for Roche Diagnostics in international marketing. In academia, he specialized in persistent viral infections and partook in projects related to eradicating rabies in Switzerland using a live attenuated vaccine and elucidated the replication cycle of the Hepatitis A virus in cell cultures.

C. Oliver Kappe is Professor of Chemistry at the University of Graz (Austria) and Scientific Director of the Center of Continuous Flow Synthesis and Processsing (CCFLOW) at RCPE GmbH. He received his diploma (1989) and his doctoral (1992) degrees in organic chemistry from the University of Graz and after two postdoctoral stays (University of Queensland and Emory University) returned to Graz in 1996 to start his independent academic career and was appointed Full Professor in 2011.

Professor Kappe has an extensive general experience and a more than 30 year track record in synthetic / physical organic chemistry, and enabling synthetic technologies communicated in more than 500 scientific publications. For the past decade the focus of his research has been directed towards flow chemistry / micro-reaction technology, encompassing a wide variety of synthetic transformations and experimental techniques. His research group is actively involved in projects dealing with API synthesis and manufacturing, employing a number of different enabling and process intensification strategies.

Dr. Hiroshi Kikuchi graduated from Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The University of Tokyo in 1977, and joined Daiichi Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. He got his Ph.D. degree in 1991 from The University of Tokyo, and worked at School of Pharmacy, The University of Michigan, as a visiting research fellow in 1993 through 1994. He made a career move to Eisai Co., Ltd. in 2007, became an Officer in 2010 through 2015, and retired from Eisai in 2018. After retirement, he built DDS Strategy Firm.

He has been an Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The University of Tokyo (1992 – 2022), and many other professors of universities. He has won several prestigious awards of Japanese academic societies. He was also profiled in Marquis Who’s Who in the World (2012 – 2016).

He has worked in the area of liposomes / LNPs for about 40 years. He has applied more than 60 basic patents (ca. 50 for liposomes), and has published more than 130 scientific papers.

Olivia Merkel has been a Professor of Drug Delivery at LMU Munich since 2015 and Chair since 2022. She is a Registered Pharmacist, received a MS (2006) and a PhD (2009) in Pharmaceutical Technology as well as numerous awards, including an ERC Starting Grant, ERC Proof-of-Concept Grant and ERC Consolidator Grant, the APV Research Award and the Carl-Wilhelm-Scheele-Award.

Merkel is the author of over 100 articles and book chapters. She served as NIH reviewer from 2014-2015, SNF reviewer from 2018-2022, is an Editorial Board member for JCR, EJPB, Molecular Pharmaceutics and other journals, was the President of the German Controlled Release Society in 2020 and the Chair of the CRS Focus Group on Transdermal and Mucosal Delivery from 2020-2022, and currently is a scientific advisory board member of Coriolis Pharma, Carver Biosciences, AMW, and CordenPharma. Her research focuses mainly on RNA formulation and pulmonary delivery for the treatment of a variety of lung diseases.

Jean-Christophe M. Monbaliu, born in Brussels, Belgium, studied chemistry at the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium, where he received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry. In 2008, he started a postdoc at the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering of the Ghent University, Belgium, where he was later appointed as a post-doctoral associate of the Research Foundation-Flanders. In 2010, he was awarded a Belgian American Educational Foundation fellowship that triggered his relocation to the USA.

He joined the Center for Heterocyclic Compounds at the University of Florida, Gainesville, USA. In 2012, he was appointed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA. In 2013, he came back to Belgium and settled at the University of Liège. Monbaliu created the Center for Integrated Technology and Organic Synthesis. He is currently Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Liège (Belgium) and serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Flow Chemistry. He is heading the Center for Integrated Technology and Organic Synthesis (CiTOS), the first European Corning^® Advanced-Flow™ reactor qualified lab. In 2022, Monbaliu created FloW4all, a training, tech transfer and service Flow Technology Platform in Wallonia.

Research interests at CiTOS revolve around synthetic organic chemistry but are multidisciplinary in essence and aim at (a) designing cheaper and more efficient routes for the preparation of high value-added chemicals such as active pharmaceutical ingredients; (b) accelerating the transition from petrobased to biobased strategies and (c) developing efficient processes with a lower environmental impact.

Christoph has more than 20 years of experience from biotech and pharma. Most recently Christoph was Chief Technology Officer of Ceptur Therapeutics, and prior to Ceptur he worked for Roche both at the innovation centre in Copenhagen where he was part of the leadership team, and at headquarters in Basel where he led the technical development of oligonucleotides.

Christoph brings extensive technical development and drug discovery experience from target identification, lead selection to clinical PoC. Key expertise areas cover technical development and discovery of oligonucleotides and RNA molecules.

Christoph holds a PhD in Medicinal Chemistry from the University of Southern Denmark and an executive MBA from Copenhagen Business School.

Prof. Dr. Roderich D. Süssmuth – 1990-1996 Chemistry studies at University of Tübingen. 1999 Dissertation with Günther Jung (U Tübingen). 2000-2001 Postdoc with Richard Lerner and Carlos Barbas III (The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA). 2004 Habilitation in Chemistry and Biochemistry. Since then Professor at TU Berlin.

Research interests: synthesis of complex peptide drugs (feglymycin, albicidin, amanitin, phalloidin, etc.), bioanalytics and structure elucidation of novel peptide antibiotics, biosynthetic pathways of peptide natural products, ribosomal & non-ribosomal peptide biosynthesis, medicinal chemistry and pharmacokinetics, microorganisms as biocatalysts, combinatorial biosynthesis, precursor-directed biosynthesis, polysulfon-based membranes and modifications for medicinal applications. Speaker of the graduate school “Bioactive peptides” (funded by the DFG). Various advisor and reviewer activities. H-factor 70 (google scholar), >240 publications, >70 doctoral students in big pharma and biotech.

Karl G. Wagner is a professor in pharmaceutical technology at the University of Bonn, Germany. His research focus is on solid oral dosage forms with emphasis on enabling and modified release dosage forms, excipients and in vivo predictive biopharmaceutical tools. Prior to his position at the University of Bonn, Karl headed an early formulation laboratory for new technologies at Boehringer Ingelheim (Germany) for 6 years.

He has more than 27 years of experience in designing multiparticulate modified release dosage forms, enabling formulations, compression analysis and development of biopharmaceutical tools. Karl is the author of several peer-reviewed articles and a frequently invited speaker at seminars and international meetings.