Dr. Jack Elands

Jack Elands has been the Chief Executive Officer of Amakem since its inception in 2010. Previous to his role as CEO at Amakem, Jack served as the CBO of Silicos, an informatics platform based biotechnology company. Prior to that, Jack served as the CEO of Vitec, a specialty biochemical company focused on antimicrobial surface chemistries and products and the VP of Business Development at Sidec AB, a Swedish company focused on the discovery and development of protein based drugs. Jack started his pharmaceutical career at Marion Merrell Dow (later HMR, now Sanofi-Aventis). He has published extensively in papers and posters on topics ranging from biomolecular screening to protein tomography to life science informatics and functional genomics and has contributed to several patents. He received his undergraduate in medical biology from University of Utrecht in 1985. Jack was awarded his doctorate in Neuropharmacology from the Rudolf Magnus Institute at University of Utrecht in 1989.

Dirk Leysen (CSO & Founder)

Dirk Leysen is the CSO and founder of Amakem. Prior to Amakem’s foundation, Dirk was head of R&D at Devgen Biopharma, where he initiated work on the novel ‘Localized Drug Action platform’ which was later in-licensed by Amakem. Previously to Devgen, Dirk held positions as Associate Director of medicinal chemistry and Managing Director of analytical chemistry at Organon. Many of the compounds he has worked on have reached the marketplace.  He has been a professor of chemical biology at Maastricht (the Netherlands).

Olivier Defert

Olivier is co-founder and director for external R&D of Amakem. Before his work at Amakem, Olivier was section leader in the medicinal chemistry department at Devgen and was actively involved in the preclinical development of two clinical candidates. Olivier joined Devgen in 2000, and got his PhD (University of Pharmacy Lille, France) under the supervision of Prof. Benoit Déprez and Prof. Jean Claude Gesquière, in 2005. Prior to Devgen, Olivier studied organic and medicinal chemistry at the Universities of Lille and Strasbourg.