Mr. Assaf Barnea is a seasoned entrepreneur and venture professional, with extensive, multidisciplinary experience in building innovation platforms and leading commercialization processes in healthcare.

He leads Sanara Ventures, a healthcare innovation fund backed by Phillips and Teva. In addition to leading Sanara, Mr. Barnea chairs the Life Science Advisory Board at The Israel Export Institute, on behalf of the Israeli government, promoting and advancing the export of Israeli technologies in the medical, biotech, pharma and digital fields in global markets. A valued consultant, Mr. Barnea also advises the World Bank’s IFC venture capital team and is a co-founder of the IFC’s Tech Emerge initiative; a unique acceleration platform that connects healthcare startups from around the world with leading corporationsand hospitals in emerging economies.

Formerly, Mr. Barnea was one of the founders of CardioSense, a medtech startup company that developed a probe for early shock detection in various medical settings.

Before lending his multidisciplinary acumen to Sanara Ventures, Assaf served as CEO of Kinrot Ventures, spearheading its acquisition by Hutchison Water in 2012. Prior to this, he headed business development at Mekorot, Israel’s national water company, where he oversaw the establishment of WaTech, the Entrepreneurship & Partnership Center for Water Technologies. For his accomplishments in both Mekorot and Kinrot, he received the Cleantech Group’s Innovation Hero Award in April 2013, which recognizes individuals whose commitment, drive and passion have made a tangible difference for innovation in general and specifically for many start-up companies.

Previously, Mr. Barnea served for four years as director of business development at Comverse, where he also co-chaired the Mobile Marketing Association.

A unique highlight in Assaf’s story is his former stint as a college basketball player at New Jersey’s Seton Hall University, where he won the Big East championship against Georgetown. He went on to play professional basketball in Israel’s national league, while completing multiple academic degrees.

A certified lawyer, Mr. Barnea holds both law and business degrees from the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzelia, as well as a BA in political science and psychology from Tel-Aviv University.

Christof Bühler has 25+ years of engineering & research experience in electronics, software, vision & sensor systems, optics, lasers and micro-technology.

His interdisciplinary expertise is in system integration, computer/information technologies, biotechnology, medical devices, sensors, computer vision, fast data processing and artificial intelligence incl. machine- and deep-learning.

Lambert has spent 24 years working for leading international management consulting firms focused on performance improvement, business transformation and cost reduction.

(Alexander Proudfoot, MCGplc, Hitachi Consulting, Renoir Group) In these companies, he held senior executive positions as business process analyst, head of auditing and assessment, business development VP and country manager.

The experience accumulated during those years conducting performance assessments and driving change management projects for more than 200 clients belonging to the world’s leading multinational corporations, government organizations, as well as to large and medium sized private companies in all types of industries and services in 36 countries, has provided Lambert with a truly global vision.

This business vision was further enhanced by spending 3 years working for the Exigen Group, a San Francisco based, multinational information technology corporation operating in the field of digital platforms for the telecommunication and financial services industry as well as offshore BPO (Business Process Outsourcing).

Lambert applied his business analysis skills to bridge information technology with operational needs and constraints and perfected his understanding of how to make them work best in the client’s interest. In 2007 Lambert decided to apply his change management expertise to the Healthcare sector by creating Boost Consulting.

Boost was founded with a mission to implement process, systems, organizational and behavioral changes in healthcare delivery, in order to improve the patient pathway; its quality and performance, whilst achieving measurable operational and financial gains.

Lambert and his team had observed that most management consultancy firms greatly underestimated the extreme complexity of healthcare and that none where offering integrated and tailor-made solutions to simultaneously address the four (processes, systems, organization, behavior) pillars of a change management program.

This insight spurred Boost to truly focus on the patient, not just in words but in action, and develop a unique approach to concurrently implement process, systems, organizational and behavioral improvements in healthcare institutions around the world.

Boost has carried out 25 projects for major hospitals in four continents and all are references. Lambert continues to act as an advisor and analyst for management consulting firms and is an “ambassador” for several hospitals.

Lambert is multicultural: French citizen, attending English, American, French schools and universities in Africa, Europe and the USA. Trilingual in English, French and Italian. Holds a PhD in political science and international relations. Lives near Milan, Italy

Co-founder and CEO of the company alcare

University Zurich: lectures „Clinical Telmedicine and e-Health“

The company alcare offers comprehensive services in the Active Assisted Living (AAL), e-health and telemedicine: the implementation of digital technologies and services in the private living sector, general support of the end-users and education of professional staff. The main goal is to provide confidence, acceptance and knowledge of the fast-growing eHealth-sector and to increase the self-determination, quality of life and safety.

As a professor for healthcare management, my research focuses on two fields:

• Process optimization in healthcare organizations (Lean Healthcare)
• The impact of Digital Health on healthcare management

At the ZHAW (Zurich University of Applied Sciences), I have conducted together with hospitals, insurances and pharma/medtech companies several projects on these two topics. We are interested in developing analogue and digital approaches that increase the quality and the efficiency of health care delivery.

Together with my colleagues from several diverse institutes, we have found the “ZHAW Digital Health Lab” to foster an interdisciplinary approach on the field Digital Health (www.zhaw.ch/digitalhealth).

My professional background, before entering academia, includes working as a supply chain manager for Nestlé S.A. and as a consultant for McKinsey & Company.

Dr. Elisabeth Stühler is specialized in developing and utilizing advanced data analytics methodology for predictive healthcare. Her focus is on biostatistics, machine learning, supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms, and she has published various articles on the application of those. She specializes in finding solutions for highly complex and diverse datasets. Before she joined the Data Analytics & Modelling team of PwC Digital Services, she was a PhD candidate at the Computer Science department of University of Konstanz, where she finished her thesis on feature detection and development in medical imaging data of the human brain. During that time she gained more than 4 years of experience in advanced feature extraction, data modeling and statistical validation.

Serial entrepreneur, Business/Technology leader with 3 meaningful exits:

Founded NetWiz, Merge with BATM (went to IPO in London) became later BATM/Telco systems (served as BATM/Telco CTO),

2 M&A: Founded WiNetworks - sold to Siemens and founded Spectrum (Own DBD GmbH) - sold to Deutsche Telekom

Ofer responsible for the development and launch of numerous products , and few breakthrough technology multidisciplinary projects and product .

Ofer served in one of the elite technology unit in the Israeli army and holds BSc from the Technion in Haifa Israel

Oxitone background:

Oxitone developed an end to end solution for Digital continuous care for patients at home.

We developed a wrist worn pulse oximeter ( without the bulky fingertip probe) that measure accurately 24/7 every second:

• SpO2 (Oxygen blood saturation)
• Pulse rate (heart rate)
• Heart Rate Variation (HRV)
• Activity/ steps ( accelerometer and Gyro)
• Skin temperature
• sleep pattern (coming soon)
• Fall detection (coming soon)

We can detect changes and trends and send automatic alarm messages when something go wrong.

Paola Castelli is Regional Sales Manager at SOPHiA GENETICS for Western Europe (France, Switzerland, Belgium, and Luxembourg).

She obtained a Master’s degree in Molecular Biology from the University of Milan.

Paola successively held positions of Product Manager for electrophoresis, chromatography, and sequencing.

She joined SOPHiA GENETICS in 2016 and has been a Territory Manager for Spain, Portugal, Africa and Middle-East for 2 years.

Andrea Riposati is the CEO & co-founder of Dante Labs, the global whole genome data company.

Prior to Dante Labs, Andrea was a Sr. Product Manager at Amazon in Seattle, where he launched 3D Printing and the Marketplace for Professional Medical Supplies.

Andrea holds an MS summac cum laude in Business from Bocconi University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Ulrich Mühlner is a senior healthcare executive with 20 years of industry experience.

In 2016, he became an active startup investor and entrepreneur to enable life-changing healthcare innovations by joining forces with scientists, innovators, and entrepreneurs, and - together - translating groundbreaking ideas, discoveries, and inventions into services and products that make a real difference to people’s lives.

Dr Mühlner is particularly passionate about transforming the healthcare industry towards personalized and value-based healthcare through Digital Health solutions, in particular in the areas of Connected Care, Patient-Generated Health Data (PGHD) / Real World Evidence, and Artificial Intelligence / Deep Learning.

To fulfill this mission, Ulrich Mühlner co-founded docdok.health to develop docdok, a GDPR and HIPAA compliant cloud based solution connecting healthcare providers with their patients in the clinical and study ecosystems, 24/7, on all devices enabling to capture objective real world data (RWD) in addition to subjective patient reported outcomes (PROs) while significantly benefiting both patients and doctors.

He also serves globally as board member and advisor to biopharma and digital health / health tech companies (e.g., E-Medicus, Insilico Medicine, Medicinisto), as well as international organizations and leading academic institutions.

Ulrich Mühlner is a frequent speaker and panelist at international biopharma, medtech, and health tech / digital health conferences.

Previously, Dr Mühlner worked at Novartis and Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

At Novartis he served as Director and Head Global Corporate Strategy, Global Head Digital Health / Healthtech Partnerships.

In these roles, he was responsible for the multi-billion dollar portfolio transformation strategy and spearheaded globally the digital health activities across Novartis leading to major digital health partnerships (Google/Verily, IBM, Proteus) with the aim to better serve patients while increasing the value of the Novartis portfolio through ‘beyond-the-drug’ realworld outcomes solutions.

In total, Dr Mühlner successfully executed partnership deals with a volume of $350mn.

Dr Mühlner studied Biochemistry in Hannover and Munich, and earned a PhD degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology based on his research on molecular mechanisms of cancer development at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (I.M.P.) in Vienna.

Grazia Frontoso is a Customer Engineer at Google Cloud in charge of supporting enterprise customers in Switzerland in digital transformation and Big Data analytics for the healthcare & life science sector.

Before joining Google, she worked for several years as Software Product Manager in risk management designing cloud solutions for regulated industries.

She holds a PhD in physics and is passionate about the transformational power of technology.

Dr. Daniel Vonder Mühll is managing Director of SystemsX.ch, the Swiss Initiative in Systems Biology aiming at establishing Switzerland in the forefront of this interdisciplinary research field in life sciences.

It is a consortium with nine universities and three research institutions as partners: ETH Zurich, EPF Lausanne, the Universities of Basel, Bern, Fribourg, Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchâtel, Zurich, the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, the Friedrich Miescher Institute and the Paul Scherrer Institute.

Following studies in Computer Science Frédéric Briguet gained extensive experience within international institutions and companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Nestle, Medtronic, Boston Scientific

In 2002, Frédéric joined Nestlé working on projects as Global eCommerce solutions for Nestlé ProfessionalTM, NespressoTM and DolceGustoTM. He managed the innovation lab for new technology and participated in the shift from traditional to new media.

He joined in 2010 NayaMed/Medtronic Europe to develop a full online, worldwide business for medical devices, as the Head of Marketing and eBusiness.

Certified from the IMD Frédéric also participated in the review of the best-selling book “Value Proposition that sells”.

In 2013, Frédéric worked as Business Model manager for Boston Scientific with the aim to manage the service digital health transformation of the company in Europe.

Frédéric joined MindMaze in 2018 fulfilling the role of Head of Marketing for clinical evidence and sales, responsible for defining the commercial strategy and business model for the healthcare branch of MindMaze: MindMotionTM

Dr. Michelle Livne is the director of machine learning for the Predictive Modeling in Medicine group at Charité - University Medicine Berlin and CTO and co-founder of Al4Medicine. She works on Applied Machine Learning in healthcare with a focus on predictive modeling for the treatment and prevention of stroke. Commercialization will bring a promising AI approach to patient care.

Philipp Löpfe was named Swiss Economic Journalist of the Year in 2012 and 2015.

He works for the online news portal «Watson». He has a Masters degree in Arts (University of Zürich) and an MBA (Universitiy of St. Gallen).

In his long career Mr. Löpfe was editor-in-chief of «Tages-Anzeiger» and «SonntagsBlick».

He has written several books, the most recent one, together with Oliver Fiecheter, is called «Aufstieg der digitalen Stammesgesellschaft» (Ascent of the digital tribal society).

Philipp Löpfe is married and lives in Zürich.

Dr Charit is an Interventional Cardiologist by training who completed his MBBS in Bijapur, MD in General medicine in Belgaum and DM in Cardiology in Chennai and returned back home to Bangalore as a consultant cardiologist at Vikram Hospital and the head of clinical service at Baptist Hospital.

Realizing that there was a significant gap in the delivery of health care leading to millions of lives lost, he founded Tricog Health one of the world’s largest health AI companies that uses modern technology enabling rapid diagnosis and management of heart disease.

Dr. Utku Gülan is the co-founder and CEO of Hi-D Imaging AG. He is a mechanical engineer with a PhD in biomedical engineering.

Dr. Gülan has over 10 years of experience in turbulence, biomedical flows and in-vitro imaging techniques. After working at ETH Zurich and University of Zurich as a senior researcher for more than 7 years, he has become a renowned expert on in-vitro imaging methods.

As an entrepreneur, his biggest ambition is to provide the service of Hi-D Imaging to as many patients as possible all around the world.

Dr. med. Christian Greis, MBA, Gründer der derma2go AG, Assistenzarzt in der Dermatologie am Universitätsspital Zürich und Master of Business Administration in digitaler Medizin.

As Director Industry Solutions for Healthcare in Western Europe, Veronica is responsible to drive strategy and business development for public and private healthcare organizations, working together with a community of professionals across the region, with a main focus on Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria, Switzerland and Belgium.

Veronica spearheads key initiatives on digital transformation in health, mobilizing industry stakeholders on key topics like cloud-first innovation and artificial intelligence in health. She is an active contributor of the European Cloud in Health Advisory Council, a vendor-neutral C-level forum aimed at fostering cloud-first innovation in the health sector.

From 2015-2017, Veronica held the role of Business Development Leader for Healthcare in Italy, working with both healthcare customers and partners / ISVs.

Before joining Microsoft, Veronica worked 15 years for IBM, covering both consultancy, sales and business development roles. Veronica graduated in Physics from Padua University and holds an International MBA from Henley Management College.

Dr. Hari Sven Krishnan is the CEO and Founder of Heilpflanzenwohl AG, an innovative consumer healthcare company, located in Switzerland. Heilpflanzenwohl AG is currently one of the fastest growing OTC companies in Germany / Europe. Previously, he has been for several years the COO of the ProSieben, Sat.1 Group (one of the leading TV Broadcasters in Europe) and Member of the Executive Board.

In particular, his responsibilities included the strategic and operational development of the digital business of the ProSieben, Sat.1 Group. A focal point thereby was the Internationalization of the media group. Previously, Dr. Krishnan worked in different divisions at ProSieben, Sat.1, including SevenVentures, the venture capital arm of the media company, as well as the management board division Digital & Adjacent.

After his studies and doctorate in Pharmaceutical Sciences, Dr. Krishnan worked at McKinsey & Company as a consultant as well as in the pharmaceutical industry at Hoechst and Novartis, where he held for almost 15 years several CEO and executive positions in the U.S., Europe and Emerging Markets with P&L responsibilities of > $ 1bn annual sales.

Dr. Krishnan is an Operating Partner / Industry Advisor to Advent International since 2011 and has supported the Firm in several large Pharma / Healthcare transactions.

He was also a Board Member of Mountain Partners AG a large global Investment company focused on Digital Start Ups.

Lars is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Corti and has previously worked with companies like Apple and Issuu. He holds a PhD from the Technical University of Denmark with an extensive research and publication history within semi-supervised and unsupervised machine learning. He was nominated PhD of the year by the department of applied mathematics and computer science.

Responsible for the overall Vision, Strategy, Leadership and Execution for Zimmer Biomet's Commercial Services outside the U.S. including full P&L Responsibility.

The umbrella "Signature Solutions" include Patient Care Pathway Optimization and OR Efficiency Consulting Services, Digital Health Technologies, Hospital Marketing and other Partnership programs to drive value within the Healthcare Eco-System and with large Hospital / Buying Groups.

Dr. Lukas Ruf is founder and CEO of Consecom AG.

Consecom is specialized in Strategic ICT Security Consulting, and offers support by concept (design), implementation and review (security testing, reviewing and auditing) services.

Lukas completed his master and Ph.D. studies the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich in electrical engineering.

For more than two decades, he has been working as a consultant, architect and auditor in the areas of governance and organization, processes, and technology.

Among others, he is a well-known specialist for end-to-end security, identity and access management as well as information security management.

Lean Manager in Fondazione Poliambulanza Institute, Brescia reporting directly to the General Manager and in charge of coordinating all continuous improvement projects within the hospital. Fondazione Poliambulanza is an Italian multidisciplinary hospital and is recognized as a pioneer when it comes to the adoption of new technologies: it is accredited HIMSS Stage 6 relative to its Electronic Medical Records (EMR) adoption model capabilities. Starting in 2010 Dottoressa Baresi was part of the IT team which was given the mission by top management to completely revise the computerization of the organization and implement a complete review of the hospital’s processes through IT.

Adjunct professor for second level university masters in “Use of information technology in a business environment” at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Brescia.

My more than two decades work experience has spanned various marketing, project management and business development roles, based on my training as an electrical engineer and masters in Telecommunication Systems (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology).

My career started while at university, when I took an assistant role in the USA. Later, I worked as an IT project manager for large key account clients at CompuNet in Munich and also worked in Hong Kong supporting the Asian region.

This prompted my move to Silicon Valley where I lived for many years, working as a Product Manager for successful startups building some of the first data communication equipments in the market. (first gigabit ethernet router/switch)

Since 2001, I provide product marketing and business development support and have organised different high-tech business events in Switzerland.

I am the organiser of about 15 per year national and international high-tech trends, innovation, entrepreneurship and technology business events in Switzerland, among them:

+ Silicon Valley meets Switzerland, svms-event.ch

+ Startup-Nation Israel meets Switzerland, startup-nation.ch

+ Chinese-Swiss High-tech Summit, china-innovation.ch

I am also the founder and president of the first - not for profit - "High-Tech Connect suisse" association encouraging and inspiring high-tech business development.

www.hightechconnect.ch

I started teaching the course "Global Innovation Ecosystems" and others at universities and look forward doing more of these as I love sharing and discussing with smart minds of all ages and cultures.