Wilma Lukas, PhD, MBA, Managing Director
Dr Lukas has over 25 years of experience in drug discovery, R&D, licensing and business development. She has a Ph.D. in Biology from the Universtity of Geneva, completed by an MBA. She gained pharmaceutical expertise at the Glaxo Institute of Molecular Biology (GSK) and Serono (now Merck) before joining a start-up that was later on successfully acquired by Molecular Devices Corp (USA). She joined Debiopharm in 2007, where she was in charge of the search and evaluation process and identified pre-clinical and clinical opportunities in several therapeutic areas.
Dr Lukas has created her own company (W Life Sciences) to provide strategic advice and expert scientific opinion to biotech companies, start-ups, universities, investors or pharmaceutical companies.
She is now actively involved with Innosuisse, the Swiss Innovation Agency, as an Expert to evaluate funding applications (from CHF 300K to CHF … several millions) and to promote Swiss innovation projects. She is a Steering committee member for SNSF (Swiss National Science Foundation) and member of the Implementation Advisory Board of NRP 79 program (3R) .
She recently joined FONGIT, the Fondation Genevoise pour l’Innovation Technologique, as a Senior Advisor & Coach.
Dr Lukas is also an Associate Partner at <bba> (Bespoke Biotech Advisory), a consultancy company in life sciences based in Italy.
She is also a Judge at MassChallenge, the WW start-up accelerator, Judge at >> Venture >>, the leading start-up competition in Switzerland.
Finally, she is supporting the Hub of entrepreneurship UCreate at the UNIL (University of Lausanne) as a Coach and is a Consultant for the E-MBA program at UNIL.
KNOW-HOW PROVIDED:
Experience in the pharmaceutical industry and biotechs
Strong understanding of science and business
Identification and evaluation of thousands of opportunities
Funding grants ranging from CHF 50K to CHF < 100 M
Wide network
Credibility in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry