Sotiris Botozis is a senior executive with a variety of leadership assignments over 25 years in big pharma and biotech, including global commercial strategy and launches. Having previously led numerous commercial teams at big pharma (like GSK, UCB, Amgen, and Astellas) he is now the founder and CEO of Anelixis Pharmaceuticals, also serving as general manager for Southeast Europe at Avanzanite Bioscience. Sotiris is passionate about patient centricity and its outcomes. He believes that no patient should be left behind when we are talking about access to therapies, even if the disease is ultra-rare.

Thomas Hauser works for G-CON Manufacturing in a business development assignment in the EMEA region to educate the market for offsite prefabricated and prequalified factory and clean-room solutions in a drive to bring forward the pharmaceutical facility of the future concept.

On the other hand, he supports companies in the life science segment mainly for expansion strategies, strategical facility implementation, startup support, and pharmaceutical packaging supply and technologies.

Before 2020, Thomas worked in various leading global positions in business development, strategic implementation, and sales in the pharmaceutical packaging field, namely in injectables and semi-solid and oral-solid packaging. He has more than 25 years of experience dealing with the global life science industry and its market and manufacturing requirements.

Thomas holds an international MBA from the University of Ottawa, Canada, and a BA for European business from the ESB Reutlingen and the ESC Reims.

Maarten Van Essen has over 15 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry, focussing on customer experience and digital strategy. For the past three years, he has guided pharmaceutical companies in their journey towards omnichannel and digital transformation at a European and global level. He has specialised in customer experience, running successful co-creation pilots, building organisational frameworks for scaling and replication, and setting up training courses for learning and development. Maarten is a pioneer who is passionate about helping organisations move from a sales-oriented business model to a more sustainable service-oriented business model. He focusses on accelerating innovation with choice and scalability.

Prior to starting his own company, Maarten was a customer excellence lead at Takeda Pharmaceuticals in Europe and Canada. He headed the effort to pilot a value-driven customer engagement approach, which collaborated with a university hospital to use human-centred design to revamp the care pathway for oncology patients. He also co-led the translation of local best practices into a state-of-the-art multichannel marketing program, including end-to-end methodology, maturity assessment, training bootcamp, playbooks, and execution tools. Maarten has held several strategic marketing roles in the Netherlands for Takeda, Danone Medical Nutrition, and Novo Nordisk, always with a strong focus on customer centricity and business model innovation.

Maarten received a bachelor’s degree in biomedical sciences and a master’s degree in biomedical sciences and product management from the University of Utrecht (NL).