Speaker

Jiri Keirsse

Head of Innovation Strategy & Public Private Partnerships - UCB

Biography

Jiri Keirsse - Head of Innovation Strategy & Public Private Partnerships, UCB

Heading UCB’s Innovation Strategy & Public-Private Partnerships team as part of the R&D organization, Jiri is responsible to inform, design, and articulate UCB’s Research and early Development strategy. Overall, his mission is to maximize value & impact by appropriately combining established internal scientific strengths with synergistic external innovation opportunities. Convinced of the potential offered by external connectivity, the team leads UCB’s engagement with & contributions to national & regional consortia, interactions with public partners (universities, hospitals, research centers), as well as public funding applications.

Jiri holds a PhD in bioengineering from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) – Vlaams Instituut Biotechnologie (VIB) (Belgium), focused on onco-immunology. Before joining UCB, he gained several years of management consulting experience at McKinsey & Company, mostly serving companies in the biotech and biopharma space on a wide range of strategy topics across the value chain.

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.