SPARK Norway Forum: Building BRIDGEs between academia and industry

Thomas Hanke EVP, Head of Academic Partnerships at Evotec AG will share his insights on successful models for academia–industry collaboration and lessons learned from evaluating and advancing early stage academic innovations into successful industry projects. He will also introduce Evotec’s BRIDGE concept.

The seminar is free and open to all, no registration required.

The BRIDGE concept is a unique program designed to fast-track early-stage drug development from academic ideas to clinical Proof of Concept. Through partnerships with Universities Evotec’s BRIDGE program provides academic researchers with immediate access to relevant industry expertise and an integrated drug discovery platform covering a broad range of disease areas.

The BRIDGE concept was first established at Oxford (LAB282) in 2016. Based on this initial success, BRIDGE programs were set up e.g. at MaRS in Toronto (LAB150), Fred Hutch in Seattle (LAB591) and most recently with Sanofi (LAB031) where the two companies will enter into research collaborations with academic institutions focused on early-stage translational projects.

At this SPARK Norway Forum Thomas Hanke will explain why the BRIDGE concept seems to have found a formula to unravel the tremendous potential that exist when the gap between academia and industry is closed.


Thomas Hanke

Executive Vice President
Head of Academic Partnerships, Evotec

  • He has 20+ years of leadership experience in research and drug development in academia, biotech and pharma.
  • From 2007 to 2013, he was Sourcing Director at the Biopharmaceuticals Research Unit of Novo Nordisk, where he identified and evaluated multiple partnering opportunities related to compounds, targets and technologies for several therapeutic areas.
  • Prior to joining Novo Nordisk, he was co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer at TeGenero, a German biotech company developing therapeutic monoclonal antibodies.
  • Preceding his entrepreneurial activities, he was group leader and Assistant Professor for Immunobiology at the University of Würzburg (1999–2002) following a PostDoc at the University of California in Berkeley where he researched basic cellular immunology (1996–1999).

Organizer

UiO:Life Science, Inven2 and Oslo Cancer Cluster
Published Oct. 17, 2018 4:25 PM - Last modified Oct. 24, 2018 10:04 AM