Speaker
Chris Van Hoof
VP R&D - imec & General Manager - OnePlanet Research Center
Biography
Chris Van Hoof - VP R&D, imec & General Manager, OnePlanet Research Center
Chris Van Hoof is Vice President R&D at imec and also General Manager of the OnePlanet Research Center. Chris believes preventive health, personalised nutrition, sustainable food production and reduced waste are essential enablers of improving our world for the generations to come. And he is convinced that technology (hardware and AI) are indispensable tools to make that happen. After receiving a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Leuven in 1992, Chris has held positions as manager and director at imec in highly diverse fields spanning technology, circuits, systems, data and applications and diverse imec locations. Apart from delivering industry-relevant innovative solutions to customers, his work also resulted in five startups (four in the healthcare domain). He is also full professor at the University of Leuven and imec Fellow. Although OnePlanet Research Center only started 5 years ago, it has already built up a team of 100 scientists and engineers, who create innovations in close collaboration with the founding partners of OnePlanet - technology teams from imec and domain knowledge from Radboud University and Medical Center and Wageningen University and Research.
Talk(s)
Welcome & Introduction 'Precision medicine in the era of AI and nanotech'
In partnership with MEDVIA.
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.
Closing Health