Speaker

Charlotte D'Hulst

Portfolio Manager Life Sciences - imec

Biography

Charlotte D'Hulst - Portfolio Manager Life Sciences, imec

As a Portfolio Manager, Charlotte helps shape imec’s offering strategy for a portfolio of technologies focused on life sciences applications.

Charlotte is an experienced entrepreneur with strong background in genetic engineering & biomedical sciences, driven by translating deep tech & basic science from bench to bedside. Based on her own academic work, she co-founded and built a start-up on a mission to decode and digitize the enigmatic sense of smell. As CEO of Yesse Technologies, Inc., headquartered in the thriving New York City biotech ecosystem, she raised over $10M and developed partnerships with nanotechnology R&D hub, imec, and The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's research, amongst others. In 2021, she managed the winddown of the company.

Charlotte is trained in bioengineering at the KU Leuven (Belgium) and received her PhD in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Antwerp (Belgium). She completed her post-doctoral training working on the molecular biology of olfaction at the City University of New York.

Talk(s)

5:30 PM

Panel - Bytes of life: redefining collaboration to digitize biology

The pharmaceutical industry grapples with skyrocketing drug development costs, exacerbated by a 60-90% failure rate in clinical trials for drugs that initially pass animal testing. The quest for improved pre-clinical models, mirroring human disease physiology, emerges as a pivotal solution to enhance drug development pipeline efficiency and mitigate costs. This challenge intersects with the bioconvergence revolution, where deep technology and fundamental biology merge, promising the true digitization of biology, predicted by Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang to be "flat out the next biggest revolution ever.”

By harnessing nanotechnology, imec pioneers humanized preclinical models, advancing our understanding of diseases like Parkinson's and specialized systems such as the blood-brain-barrier. This approach addresses industry needs for scaling and robustness of these microphysiological systems.

However, these bioconvergent tools are a means to an end as the true value lies in the otherwise unattainable data-driven insights that these tools will bring to the end-users. Yet, the journey from innovation to end-user adoption faces a funding valley of death. Imec, with its track-record in driving the semiconductor roadmap through running pre-competitive programs, advocates for replicating its efficient collaborative funding model to drive the bioconvergence roadmap, sharing costs and risks, while accelerating the delivery of transformative healthcare solutions.