Prior to his tenure at Fibrocor Therapeutics, Bill served as the Senior Vice President, Alliance Management at Evotec having moved over from the business development team, there he made significant contributions to the company’s collaborations and success. Prior to Evotec, he held positions with Eurofinns/DiscoveRx and started his career at Pfizer. Over his career, Bill has gained extensive insight into the global drug discovery and biopharmaceutical landscape, honing his understanding of the intricacies of the drug discovery process and staying abreast of industry and technology, as well as, commercial trends. Bill’s expertise and deep understanding of the pharmaceutical industry have resulted in a consistent track record of successful program implementation and company value creation. Throughout his career, he has spearheaded numerous high-impact initiatives, including shared-risk, integrated drug discovery collaborations leading to substantial deal terms.

PrezistaTM, OlysioTM, JyselecaTM and RekambysTM. He started his career in industry at the Janssen Research labs in Beerse (1988-1998), next moved to Tibotec-Virco, where he was Vice President, Drug Discovery, Early Development and CM&C (1998-2008) and most recently was Chief Scientific Officer at Galapagos (2008-2021). Under his leadership, Galapagos built out a pipeline of first-in class medicines that drove the growth of the company to a top European biotech player. He has been responsible for all aspects of drug discovery, preclinical research, CM&C, phase 1 and phase 2 clinical trials. He has a broad experience in anti-infective, autoimmune and anti-fibrotic disease research. Piet Wigerinck is an independent board member of Ipsen SA, France, miDiagnostics NV, Belgium and Atriva Therapeutics GmbH, Germany. He is the scientific co-founder of Xinvento, Netherland.

Dr Ford is a UK trained pulmonologist and completed his PhD in the cellular biology of COPD at Imperial College London as part of Prof. Peter Barnes’ lab. Whilst there he set up his own lab with clinical commitments in cough and difficult asthma. He was then a translational medicine expert at Novartis, the chief medical officer at Galecto and head of fibrosis programs at Galapagos. Latterly, he was SVP, clinical development at Puretech. He now runs phraktion, a broad based pharma consulting group, utilising around a hundred industry experts to provide end to end solutions for biopharma.

Through his involvement in corporate finance he contributed successfully to the growth and exits of several healthcare ventures such as Biogazelle, PharmaFluidics, and Multiplicom. He had a pivotal role in relocating Biocartis from Lausanne to Flanders and has a proven track record in applying for regional and EU funding. He was involved in the start-up and successful IPO of Movetis (€100M).
Prior to that he was 10 years at Janssen Pharmaceutic (J&J) as a financial analyst and as member of the business development team for the Belgian-Chinese Joint-Venture, Xian-Janssen.
Luc holds a Master’s degree in Scientific Applied Economics, specialising in International Business Affairs from K.U. Leuven. He is also the author of three business books on financial planning and venture capital.