Management team

Chief Executive Officer: Mark Vaeck, PhD

Mark Vaeck has more than 25 years of experience in the biotech and pharma industry. In 2008 he co-founded Complix and has been a member of the Board of Directors since its inception. In May 2010 he helped completing the Series A financing round of Complix and was elected CEO.

Before that, from June 2006 until April 2010 Mark has been the founding CEO of ActoGeniX, a biopharmaceutical company based in Ghent (Belgium) developing novel protein therapeutics for oral delivery. As CEO of ActoGeniX he raised over 35 million Euro in two rounds of equity financing.

From mid-2001 until May 2006 he served as CEO of Ablynx NV (Belgium), a biopharmaceutical company developing therapeutic antibody fragments, which he co-founded in June 2001. During his tenure at Ablynx he raised 30 million Euro in equity financing and concluded several corporate deals with major pharmaceutical companies.

Prior to joining Ablynx, Mark was Chief Operating Officer of Ceres Inc. (USA), a genomics company focused on the development of innovative technologies for biofuel production. Between 1993 and 1998 he served as Director Business Development and thereafter as CEO of Keygene, a biotechnology company in The Netherlands.

Between 1983 and 1993 he held several management positions in the biotech and pharma industry, including Director Business Development at EuroCetus (Chiron Corp.), Manager Licensing at UCB Pharma, and Manager Business Development at Plant Genetic Systems.

Over the last couple of years he has also been chairman of the BioWin jury, which evaluates promising new life sciences projects for the regional government in Wallonia.

Mark Vaeck received his PhD in Immunology in 1982 from the Free University of Brussels.

Chief Scientific Officer: Ignace Lasters, PhD

Ignace Lasters has more than 20 years of experience in the life science industry.  He has published over 60 internationally peer-reviewed articles and is named inventor on numerous patent applications. His research experience involves various aspects of biochemistry, physico-chemistry and computer modeling techniques, applied to protein engineering and drug discovery.

Ignace holds a PhD in Biochemistry from the Free University of Brussels (1980). After a few years of post-doctoral research in the area of neutron and X-ray scattering of higher order chromatin, he joined the biotech industry in 1986. As head of the Computer Modeling Group in the Protein Engineering Division of PGS (now Bayer CropSciences, Ghent, Belgium), he focused on the development of 3-D modeling software for the design of improved industrial enzymes.

In 1991 he joined Corvas International (now Dendreon, WA, USA) and headed up a team that discovered novel anti-thrombotics based on protein-based inhibitors against enzymes in the blood coagulation cascade.

In 1995 he went back to academia and spent 2 years as a senior researcher at the University of Louvain (Belgium), in the laboratory of Professor Desirė Collen, the inventor of t-PA and founder of Thrombogenics. Thereafter, in 1997 he became an independent consultant and executed projects for various companies, including Innogenetics, Keygene and Genscope, focusing on structural bioinformatics, biostatistics and advanced scientific programming applications.

In 1999, Ignace co-founded Algonomics (acquired by Lonza in 2008), a bioinformatics services company dedicated to immunogenicity analysis of therapeutic proteins and antibody engineering. He combined the role of CEO and CSO at Algonomics until 2007.

In 2008 he co-founded Complix and became its first CEO. From June 2010 Ignace assumes the role of CSO at Complix.