Leadership

Jörn Klinger

Chief Executive Officer

Joern has explored how humans learn, first as a linguist and then as a computational psychologist scientist during his Masters at Oxford, where he created deep learning models of the brain.

In his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin he flipped his research on its head and studied how humans from diverse backgrounds learn to improve AI. He spent a month each year in an indigenous community in Oaxaca, Mexico and then channeled his insights to build state of the art computational models - one example is a model that detects irony in social media posts.

He met Marco while working as a Lead Data Scientist in London and got so fascinated with Genomics and the ideas that would become biotx.ai that he quit his job and became a full time founder.

Joern in also on the scientific advisory board of the CRO Simbec-Orion.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joern-klinger/

Charles Ravarani

Chief Technology Officer

Charles is our CTO. With his PhD and Post-Doc in Computational Genomics from the University of Cambridge, he excellently ties together Marco's drug development knowledge and Joern's machine learning background.

In addition to his outstanding academic contributions, Charles published in Nature, he is a software development veteran. Charles took the prototypes that Joern built and turned them into production quality software that scales to the platform level.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cravarani/

Marco Schmidt

Chief Scientific Officer

Marco had an exceptional academic career. He won the best PhD of the year award in Chemistry in his home country Germany and then went on to do a Post-Doc at the University of Cambridge.

During his time at Cambridge, Marco received a Marie-Curie fellowship, as well as a stipend from the Gates Foundation to do his own research. Marco worked with excellent people like Chris Abell (who would later become vice chancellor) and Tom Blundell, the founders of Astex, a fragment based drug discovery company that was acquired for $866 Million.

His work with Chris and Tom opened his eyes to the possibilities of launching his own company, as well as to the limitation of traditional approaches to drug development: The inability to predict clinical efficacy. Solving this problem became the mission of biotx.ai.

Marco in also on the scientific advisory board of the CRO Simbec-Orion.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marco-schmidt-7527aa19

Technology

Justin Cope

Data Scientist

Justin takes great interest in philosophy, language and computer science. During his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin he build Natural Language Processing models that are able to understand the temporal order of events in written text, i.e. what happens first, what happens second and so on.

His NLP skills are instrumental to the data mining aspects of the biotx.ai platform, but Justin has also become a master in genomics in record time, improving and implementing our core algorithms - have a look at our paper where he is first author here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgene.2021.744557/full.

Outside of science Justin spends a lot of time on music: He has been an on and off semi-professional musician and plays almost every instrument in existence.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlcope/)

Margaretha Lamparter

Data Scientist

Margaretha is a data scientist who, for personal reasons, transitioned to bioinformatics after already having obtained a degree in art therapy. She received her BSc from the Frei University of Berlin and got practical experience prior to biotx.ai through her internships at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics where she worked on Next Generation Sequencing Data, as well as the now rather famous Robert Koch Institute, where she worked as a software developer.

At biotx.ai, among other things, she has made a significant impact on the reporter tool and was responsible for one of the most fundamental steps of every single analysis we conducted - phenotype selection from biobank data.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/margaretha-lamparter/

Hannes Baukmann

Data Scientist

Hannes is a data scientist with an interdisciplinary background in bioinformatics, drug discovery, and protein biochemistry. After receiving a Master degree in Molecular Life Science from the University of Lübeck, he worked at the Max Planck Insitute of Colloids and Interfaces where he identified proteins’ allosteric binding sites for small molecule fragments.

In order to complement his life science skills with a computational point of view, Hannes completed a Master program in Bioinformatics at the Free University Berlin. Hannes started working for biotx.ai in 2020 where translates his scientific experience and computational skills into practical applications.

Outside of science Hannes spends a lot of time on football grounds: a passionate soccer player for all of his life, he recently picked up Gaelic football and represents the German national team.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannes-baukmann-ba848012b/)

Radi Hilaneh

Creative Developer

Radi is a creative developer from Toronto, Canada, who loves experimenting with tech.

He graduated from York University with a degree in Digital Media and Computational Arts.

With knowledge of Adobe CC, as well as HTML/CSS/JS, Radi freelanced as a graphic designer and UX/UI developer for a couple of years after graduation, before moving to Berlin, and joining the biotx.ai team shortly after.

If you like any of the graphics on our website, there is a good chance that Radi made them.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/radihilaneh/

Valentin Noske

Research Assistant

Valentin is a working student at biotx.ai. He has been involved in mathematics since his youth, during which he was active in a high-ability group. After graduating from high school, however, he decided to dedicate himself to the novel research field of bioinformatics.

Since last year, he has his bachelor's degree from the Humboldt University in Berlin in his pocket and decided to directly pursue a master's degree in computer science.

At biotx.ai he is supporting the development team in building the internal graph database.

Valentin also dreams of founding his own startup one day. Therefore, he is very proud to be part of realizing biotx.ai's vision.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/valentin-noske-42a87b20b/

James Sullivan

Data Scientist

James is a Data Scientist with fascination for the natural world and the diversity of all living things. 

He obtained his Bachelor of Science from the University of Queensland where he acquired a strong foundational background in biomedical and life sciences with a major in genetics.

Motivated by harnessing the newly emerging and rapidly advancing computational tools and methods in the field of genomics and the great potential impact this will have for the future, James completed a Masters of Bioinformatics (MSc) at Freie Universität Berlin.  

During his masters he undertook a research internship at the Berlin Center for Genomics in Biodiversity that provided rich experience in the computational aspects of genome sequencing and assembly, and culminated in him developing a novel tool for the rapid and parallel evaluation of whole-genome assemblies. 

Outside of work James enjoys exploring the wilderness; spotting creatures of all sizes. He is a lifelong football fan, loves good food, good film and television, and great video games.

Board of Directors

Harald Pinger

Board of Directors

Harald has held high ranking position, including CEO, CFO and Chairman at a plethora of publicly traded companies including Fresenius, Karstadt and Kion Group.

As an Angel Investor he has been supporting German startups in the health space for many years.

Harald was our first major investor and believed in our vision, when it was just that, a vision. His help has been instrumental in getting where we are now.

Harald's Wikipedia entry: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harald_Pinger

Hussein Kanji

Board of Directors

Hussein is one of the two original partners at Hoxton Ventures, a fund located in London, operated according to the Silicon Valley model. Out of the less than 20 companies that Hoxton had in their portfolio at the time of their investment in biotx.ai, three have now reached unicorn status and of those two have had successful IPOs.

This means that we are in good company and have lots to live up to. Hussein's presence on our board assures that we stay on track to reach our grand vision.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hkanji

Hoxton Ventures: https://www.hoxtonventures.com/

Advisors

Jack Scannell

Drug Selection Committee

Dr. Jack Scannell recently became CEO of Etheros Pharmaceuticals, a biotech start-up out of Oxford and Vanderbilt Universities. Etheros is developing a new class of small molecule enzyme mimetics to treat neurogenerative diseases. However, he is best known for his work on R&D productivity in the biopharma industry. He coined the term “Eroom’s Law” to describe the contrast between the exponential decline in R&D output efficiency since 1950 in the face of huge gains in the brute force efficiency and quality of the scientific activities on which drug discovery presumably depends. He is an Associate of the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation Studies at Edinburgh University. His recent academic work has focused on the predictive power of screening and disease models. He has experience in drug and biotech investment, having been Co-Head of European Pharmaceuticals and Biotechnology at UBS Investment Bank and Head of European Healthcare at Sanford Bernstein. He has commercial biotech experience, having Discovery Biology at e-Therapeutics PLC, an Oxford-based firm that exploited bioinformatics / computational drug discovery methods. He has a Ph.D. in physiology (computational neuroscience) from Oxford University and a degree in medical sciences from Cambridge University.

At biotx.ai he leads the drug selection committee - a group of pharma and regulatory experts that ensures that those treatments discovered by our AI that go into clinical trials will smoothly go through regulatory processes and have a good market fit.

Hubert Truebel

Drug Selection Committee

Prof. Hubert Truebel is a medical doctor, PhD and entrepreneur with a plethora of experience in pharma and drug development and currently works as the CMO of AiCuris. He has published in NEJM and is an expert on animal models for rare diseases.

At biotx.ai Hubert is part of the drug selection committee and ascertains that we focus on those clinical developments with the best market fit and regulatory outlook.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hubert-truebel/

Tobias Schaefer

Strategic Advisor

Tobias is a Financial Executive with 15 years of experience in the US and Europe at companies with a broad range of maturity and scale, primarily operating in SaaS and Life Sciences. He currently serves as Chief Financial Officer of KINEXON, a leading provider of software and services that capture, optimize and automate processes in manufacturing, logistics, and sports. Prior to joining KINEXON, Tobias spent over six years at Medidata Solutions, a leading provider of software used by major pharma and biotechnology companies. While at Medidata, Tobias served as CFO overseeing financial planning and analysis, pricing, commercial engagement, controllership, procurement, tax and finance operations. Tobias’ experience also includes a variety of financial leadership roles at Siemens, including the company’s Healthcare and Energy sectors.

Andrew Thompson

Strategic Advisor

Andrew Thompson is a Silicon Valley based Chief Executive, entrepreneur and investor with a 30-year track record of successful technology-based innovation. As a Founder and Chief-Executive he has raised over $750M in private, public and corporate capital for first-in-category companies and personally negotiated three successful M&A transactions with Fortune 50 enterprises. In addition to his entrepreneurial career, he has been a Board Member at Stanford University Libraries for 20 years working on digital innovations that increase “speed to knowledge”. He is a founder and Board Member at Summit Schools, a charter school network operating in all 50 US states that uses digital tools to deliver personalized learning solutions. Andrew is an Associate and Strategic Advisory Board Member of the Creative Destruction Lab and Board Member and Advisor to several techbio companies in Europe, Asia and the United States.

George Savage

Strategic Advisor

George Savage is a Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur and investor with a successful track-record of first-in-category medical product innovation. As a founder, board member and C-level executive he has successfully taken multiple revolutionary ideas through the full lifecycle from conception to funding, development, regulatory approval, commercialization and exit. Dr. Savage pioneered catheter-based minimally-invasive surgery inside the heart, proceeding from concept to FDA premarket approval in only three years. In 2014, he was named one of the 100 most inspiring people in the pharmaceutical industry by PharmaVoice. In 2016, Dr. Savage was elected a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering “for innovation and medical device entrepreneurship and in advancement of transformative digital health technologies to reduce healthcare cost and improve personalized medicine.” He is a mentor of the Creative Destruction Lab and advises companies based in the United States, Europe and Asia.