Management
Philippe Stas, MBA - Chief Executive Officer
Philippe Stas has been active at the interface of information technology, protein engineering, and bioinformatics for almost two decades. From 1990 to 1997, he attended the Free University of Brussels (Belgium) where he conducted applied research for projects involving antibody engineering and bioinformatics. After working as IT Manager at Perkin-Elmer's Genscope subsidiary (currently Applied Biosystems, CA, USA), he helped found Algonomics in 1999, where he was in charge of operations and business development. Philippe Stas holds an MBA, a M.Sc.E. in biotechnology and a M.Sc. in Information Technology.
Philippe serves as the Chairman of the Belgian Association for Bioindustries (Bio.be) and as the President of the
European Immunogenicity Platform (EIP).
Dr. Ignace Lasters - Chief Scientific Officer
Dr. Ignace Lasters has over 25 years industrial experience in protein engineering and structural bioinformatics. From 1985 to 1990, he was responsible for the protein design group at Plant Genetics Systems (currently Bayer CropSciences, Gent, Belgium). In 1991 he joined Corvas International (currently Dendreon, WA, USA) as head of bioinformatics. He served as sr. consultant between 1997 and 1999 at Genscope. In 1999, Ignace played a seminal role in the founding of Algonomics, and served as the company's first CEO until 2007. Dr. Lasters received his PhD in chemistry from the Free University of Brussels in 1980. He is the author of over 50 publications on such relevant topics as immunogenicity screening, peptide-receptor binding, and protein-structure modeling and optimization.
Dr. Qingyu Cao, MBA - Business Development Manager
Dr. Cao is a trained immunologist and geneticist, who obtained a PhD in Molecular Genetics from Fudan University (Shanghai, PR China) in 2001. Qingyu then went on to complete a further five years of postdoctoral research on T-cell activation, cell cycle control and apoptosis at the Center for Vaccine Biology and Immunology (Univ. Rochester, Rochester, NY). In 2005, Qingyu came to Europe for Management Training at the EM Lyon Business School (Ecully, France). After obtaining her MBA degree in 2006, Dr. Cao was recruited by Sanofi-Pasteur (Lyon, France) in 2006 where she worked in the field of market research and strategic analysis on new vaccines in support of business decision-making. She joined Algonomics in 2007.
Dr. Vera Goossens - Director of Lab Services
Dr. Goossens received her PhD in Biotechnology in 1996 from the University of Gent (Belgium), after which she carried out postdoctoral research on cell death pathways at the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology (Gent). Prior to joining Algonomics in 2007, Vera was responsible for the Assay Development Unit at the therapeutics division of Innogenetics (Gent, Belgium) from 2002 to 2007 where her group optimized the design of several polyepitope vaccine constructs (hepatitis B, hepatitis C, human papillomavirus). Her team also developed innovative bioassays in support of product characterization, clinical endpoint measurement, and antibody screening measurement. At Algonomics, she is in charge of laboratory services and application of the Epibase® in vitro immunogenicity screening platform.
Dr. Philippe Alard - Head of Bioinformatics
Dr. Philippe Alard has experience in various branches of bioinformatics: structural biology, sequence analysis, microarray and data management. He obtained his PhD in chemistry from the Free University of Brussels in 1991. Both his PhD and postdoctoral research were carried out in structural biology during nine years. Then he switched to bioinformatics, sequence analysis and data management, for more than ten years first at the Belgian EMBnet Node and after at the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology as group leader. In 2005 he joined Algonomics where he is head of bioinformatics. His team is in charge of the further development of Epibase, immunogenicity prediction tool, and of the research on the antibody engineering platform, epitope prediction and affinity maturation.
