Agnieszka Wegrzyn

Agnieszka Wegrzyn is one of the founders and Chief Science and Technology Officer of EV Biotech, where she is responsible for developing short and long-term strategies for scientific and technological developments. Together with the team, Agnieszka has created a unique computational pipeline that merges biology with computational modelling and artificial intelligence (AI) to create one-of-a-kind microbial production strains, with the overall mission to shift the petrochemical industry to a greener and more sustainable alternative based on fermentation. She combines her role as CSTO at EV with an appointment as a senior postdoctoral scientist at Leiden University, where she leads interdisciplinary projects focusing on understanding the mechanisms of neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration in the context of Parkinson's Disease. In her roles, Agnieszka leads her employees and students with passion and compassion, supporting people's growth and ambitions and helping them flourish regardless of their career choices. 

Ana Mingorance

My career is my mission: to have treatments for all diseases and to make the discovery of medicines sustainable. We are in a golden age for biotech, but getting that science to patients is hard. I am fighting this paradigm as a social entrepreneur, where I partner with patient groups to advance new medicines, and also as a biotech entrepreneur, currently leading Singularity Bio. I am honored to be nominated for the TOPX Females to Follow Award, and hope to use this visibility to empower other women to pursue purpose-driven entrepreneurship in Life Sciences.   

Diana van Stijn

Diana van Stijn M.D. Ph.D is a pediatric resident who works at the Amsterdam UMC, The Netherlands. Dr. van Stijn is the co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of Lapsi Health, a Digital Biomarker development company located in The Netherlands. She is the lead of Innovation and Medical strategy of the company, creating new digital biomarkers that will reshape clinical decision making, support patient empowerment and enable proper digital clinical research.

She is also a leading expert on digital therapeutics (DTx) and is a faculty member of the DTxcellence program, a first of its kind digital education initiative for medical and non-medical professionals that want to learn Digital Therapeutics and other important concepts of Digital Health.

Dr. van Stijn received her Ph.D. in Pediatrics investigating Kawasaki disease and the COVID-related new emerging pediatric disease called MIS-C. Dr. van Stijn believes in the democratization of healthcare and the empowerment of women in Healthcare and Health-Tech.

Elise de Reus

During her work in microbial strain engineering at Perfect Day and Zymergen in California, Elise was inspired by the huge potential of industrial biotechnology to produce everyday products like dairy protein in a more sustainable way. Despite many technological advances, it is still risky and expensive to bring a new bioprocess to the market. This motivated Elise to co-found Cradle in 2021. Cradle aims to empower scientists with advanced Machine Learning models for designing improved proteins and enzymes with fewer experiments. Accelerating the contribution of biotechnology to a sustainable future is a goal that unites people from different backgrounds and disciplines, and this is where networks like TOPX can play a part!

Jacqueline Kazmaier

Jacqueline has a background in Industrial Engineering with a PhD in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. Having grown passionate about data driven decision making, she started her career as a data scientist at consulting firm Cape AI. In the midst of the pandemic, Jacqueline co-founded health tech startup Autoscriber after a successful pilot project with a Dutch hospital - collaborating fully remotely for the first year. Based in The Netherlands, the company leverages the latest developments in speech recognition, natural language processing and clinical knowledge graphs to assist doctors in the consultation room. Jacqueline has received numerous accolades for her research in NLP as well as her work with Autoscriber, which was a regional finalist in the Xtreme Tech Challenge, as well as the EU Startup Pitch Competition. As a young woman in tech entrepreneurship, she hopes to use TOPX as a platform to inspire others to pursue similar paths, and to form part of the community of female leaders in Science. 

Kirsten Steinbusch

Serial entrepreneur in biotech with a track record as CEO in growing early-stage innovations to VC funded companies Chaincraft and DAB.bio. Based on her PhD, she co-founded Chaincraft in 2010 while being motivated to make a difference. her mission is to offer cost effective alternatives for fossil-based chemical by renewable alternatives produced by fermentation. As CEO she raised over € 15M funding and lead successfully technical and commercial developments reaching technical maturity up to demo scale. Since 2021, she is CTO of DAB.bio and is responsible for the scale up and international market introduction of a new cost-effective biomanufacturing platform. 

Margret Huenerbein

Throughout my career and life, I never stopped transitioning. I came from a technical background, went through marketing and business development, gained medical knowledge and moved between continents. But my strongest appreciation is in people as individuals, where everyone is unique. To put me in someone’s shoes helps to reflect also on my own actions. I believe, being authentic and passionate inspires the team to be part of the challenging venture journey. This character helps me build a business step by step in the health sector and to make a difference for the most vulnerable newborns and their families.

Mitasha Bharadwaj

Founding an infectious disease diagnostic company has been the great honour of my life. As a scientist, I am glad that my invention has an unlimited potential to change lives globally. Reflecting back, all throughout my doctorate, I had one dream - to build a healthier future for all.  And I am thrilled as I am progressing to fulfil that dream by bringing diagnostics for infectious diseases at home in the form of self-tests. Building on dreams naturally fuels adrenaline and thereby paves the path to change the trajectory of humanity in real-time – food for thought for all budding innovators. 

Sophia Shanko

Sophia E. Shanko (32) holds a BSc in Automation Engineering, an MSc in MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS- semiconductors) and a PhD in Microsystems (Mechanical engineering). In 2019 she founded ShanX Medtech and now she is full time CEO of the company. ShanX Medtech is an Eindhoven-based company developing antibiotic efficiency testing devices to help doctors prescribe the correct antibiotic for each patient individually. An example where such a device is a necessity is Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs). Hundreds of millions of people suffer from a UTI every year worldwide. Being predominantly a bacterial infection, the treatment thereof is straightforward, an antibiotic prescription. But which antibiotic is the correct one? ShanX is helping address this question with their innovation. ShanX is the outcome of Sophia’s inventiveness, passion and drive to regulate antibiotic usage. Her leadership has been recognized by the Gap Summit 2020 Global Biotech Revolution (Cambridge University) naming her a BioBusiness Leader of Tomorrow and her passion has added her to the list of the InspiringFifty Deep Tech Benelux+ in 2021. Less than a month ago, Sophia was recognized as Best Impact Entrepreneur by The Netherland-America Foundation and the Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in New York. Sophia is proudly building a world where women, like herself, are defining and designing a better future for patient care. She hopes that her positivity and charisma serve as an inspiration to others, and that – while leading by example – true passion paired with determination and grit, can empower women to meet their potential and realise their dreams.

Violette Defourt

Violette (BE) graduated in 2021 from a in master biomedical science and science-based business from Leiden University. During her studies, she participated in the international iGEM competition organized by MIT, where the team won the competition for their innovative diagnostics project. Ever since, she has been dedicating herself to growing the Rapidemic start-up and team, to bring their first diagnostics product to the market for quick and accurate diagnosis of sexually transmitted diseases. She has always been passionate about global health, and finding ways to positively contribute to the regression of the impact of infectious diseases on the world.

The winner of the TOPX Females to Follow Award 2022 in the category Rising Star - Entrepreneurship, will have the possibility to enroll in the Talent Accelerator Programme for BioBusiness in the class of 2022/2023 for free! 

TAP (Talent Accelerator Programme) BioBusiness is an intensive training and mentoring programme spanning over a period of 10-months, organised by Hyphen Projects. For more information visit the website.

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