Archives: Speakers

Accomplished and growth-focused professional with 17+ years’ experience managing operations in healthcare sector across multiple locations, including Europe, US and Canada. Proven track record of success in optimising current processes to deliver quality services, establishing and growing businesses through effective change management strategies, and increasing staff performance via exercising strong leadership role. Skilled in collaborating with top businesses / clients across all pharma segments, managing large budgets, as well as directing multidisciplinary global teams to exceed company KPIs. Instrumental in managing projects in all clinical phases, while monitoring operations in line with industry regulations. Possess high degree of commercial awareness and understanding of business drivers within life science industry, including pharma industry, Labs/Analytics, manufacturing, and medical corporations. Exceptional organizational, interpersonal, and communication skills with ability to maintain long-term professional relationships at all levels.

Benoît has a Master degree in IT from the University of Compiègne France and has worked 25+ years for the digitalisation of the clinical trials process for start-ups and world leading medical device and pharmaceutical companies.

As Chief Digital Trust Officer for Partners for Patients, Benoît aims at proposing disruptive digital approaches to specific challenges in the industry like health data access.

As the founder of the PicAps association, Benoît intends to implement one of such propositions: empowering the patients while keeping their anonymity well protected

Dr. Bhargava Reddy has over 16 years of experience working in the pharmaceutical industry. He is currently Head of Advanced Insights at Janssen Pharmaceutical supporting clinical operations by providing data science solutions. Prior to this role, he was Associate Director of Advanced Analytics at UCB. In this role, he was responsible for the development and application of machine learning methodologies supporting clinical decision making within Immunology and. He was also leading the analytics work supporting Risk Based Monitoring. Prior to this role, he managed a statistical programming group and was also overseeing a large statistical programming group offshore. Dr. Reddy has published several methodology papers in peer reviewed academic journals in the areas of machine learning and deep learning. He is actively involved as an associate editor for the Frontiers in AI journal and also as a reviewer on several journals. He has a Ph.D. from Oklahoma State University and MS from Northwestern University.

Alvaro Arjona is Editor-in-Chief at GlobalData Media, with extensive experience in leading editorial teams covering Pharma & Healthcare. Former Editorial Director of Thomson Reuters Drug News, Alvaro started his career making significant contributions to the field of Immunology at Yale School of Medicine. He has also led scientific communications at UCB Pharma and developed data-driven clinical intelligence products at Informa Pharma Intelligence.

Pavlina Walter is the Global Clinical Operations Lead, with expertise in rare disease (PW, HIO) pediatrics and medical devices. For 15 years, Pavlina has been responsible for management of Central & Eastern European region and USA in regard to projects set up, execution, oversight and reporting, providing local strategic planning and organization to achieve successful studies completion. Pavlina holds an Executive MBA. Managing Director and owner of Shasta medical company, providing consulting for American biotech companies in CEE.

Dr. John Zibert, Chief Medical Officer Coegin Pharma AB, a listed Nordic biotech company with several unique molecular technologies and compounds , where he also serves as CEO of Avexxin Oncology AS and Board Member of Reccura Therapeutics AS. He received his master’s in medicine and human biology, and PhD in immunology at the University of Copenhagen, DK and University of Otago, NZ. He has demonstrated a successful history of working in the pharmaceutical and digital healthcare industry in established corporate businesses, and in an incubator co-establishing more than 25 start-ups within digital health and biotech, and several of his own biotech companies. Furthermore, he has an academic footprint of 79 publications in particular within digital health, tumor biology and dermatology. He has a deep experience within execution of drug research and development, Decentralized Clinical Trials, digital healthcare solutions, and leadership.

Hans-Juergen Arens PhD is currently Vice President of International Clinical Research Services at Frenova Clinical Research. He has nearly three decades of experience in the pharma and medtech industries and worked previously in global clinical research and development at Takeda, Merck KGaA, and Abbott/AbbVie. At Fresenius Medical Care he headed the Department of Medical Affairs from 2010 to 2016 for the company’s renal pharmaceuticals international business. Hans-Juergen uses his expertise to involve himself and his team in directing international clinical trial and data services, supporting clients with medical and operational leadership, as well as consulting services. As Head of Frenova International he has developed a service portfolio dedicated to supporting external sponsor companies in the planning, preparation and execution of clinical trials at centres throughout Europe, Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia/Pacific. He received his PhD in Pharmacology/Toxicology from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany.

Since 2000, Kai has been a pioneer in patient-facing solutions for clinical trials working with young innovative technology companies. In 2012, Kai co-founded eClinicalHealth, the developers of the Clinpal decentralized clinical trial platform. In 2019 Kai co-founded the DEEP initiative to co-create a novel integrated ecosystem for the development, validation and acceptance of digital measures. Kai continues to work with DEEP, which is now an independent company. Through his involvement in technical, operational and scientific roles, he has gained deep and holistic understanding of the clinical trial process and the key mechanisms of our ecosystem.

Kai brings his entrepreneurial spirit and creative mindset to support Janssen’s global regulatory policy work across a range of topics. Kai has a passion for broad pre-competitive collaboration and is motivated to modernize the ways our broader ecosystem works together to advance the adoption of novel tools and methods to support efficient and patient-centric pharmaceutical R&D.