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Securitas BioSciences

Management team

Matías Vidal

Co-Founder and Executive Director

Matías Vidal

Co-Founder and Executive Director

Co-Founder and Executive Director of Securitas BioSciences. Mr. Vidal has led the formation and organization of Securitas and attracted key human resources; a diverse interdisciplinary group of scientists, doctors and executives. Mr. Vidal oversees Finvest Group’s investments in Biotech and Healthcare. In 2013, Mr. Vidal co-founded Finvest’s group first initiative in the biotech sector, VirTech Bio, and led the company as CEO until August 2019. Mr. Vidal has an extensive international career, with over 25 years experience in consulting, Investment Banking, M&A, and portfolio management. Mr. Vidal began his career in Cooper&Lybrand (Buenos Aires and London office), in the Telecom, Media and Technology team. He then began a career in Investment Banking at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, based in London and New York, and then moved to Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. He joined Rio Bravo Investimentos in 2003, and has been with Finvest Group (split from Rio Bravo) since 2007.

Dr. Julián Maggini

Scientific Director and Chief Navigator

Dr. Julián Maggini

Scientific Director and Chief Navigator

Juián Maggini is an MD PhD from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Dr. Maggini has specialized in internal medicine at the Austral University Hospital and completed his doctoral thesis at the National Academy of Medicine studying the immunological role of mesenchymal stem cells. He has collaborated in the foundation of the cell culture platform in the Department of Pharmacology of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Buenos Aires. He participated in the creation of the General Direction of Science and Tecnology Policy Management in the City of Buenos Aires, as an advisor to the General Director. He also worked as Medical Director of the Laboratorio Internacional Argentino and Abbott EPD. Since 2015, Dr. Maggini is the Director of the Technology Transfer Office of the Austral University, which articulates the University, the University Hospital and the Austral Technology Business Park - based companies to promote scientific projects of high impact. The strategy of the TTO is to develop demand-oriented Science & Technology platforms, working collaboratively with technology-based companies as strategic partners. We aim to achieve the sustainability of our R&D portfolio and create an innovation ecosystem based on scientific knowledge.

Mariano Núñez

Clinical Pharmacology Director

Mariano Núñez

Clinical Pharmacology Director

Mariano Nuñez, is an MD graduated from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has specialized in Internal Medicine and Pharmacology. He is currently Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Buenos Aires and Director of Pharmacovigilance at the Institute of Pharmacology, School of Medicine, University of Buenos Aires. He has worked as an advisor in the Ministry of Health of Argentina, and has worked as a scientific director in pharmaceutical companies. He is currently general manager of Tecnología Innovativa, a company dedicated to providing global business development services to the pharmaceutical industry, and has participated in the development of several cooperation agreements between global and local companies for business and project development.

Augusto Carvalho

Finance Director

Augusto

Augusto Carvalho

Finance Director

Senior Analyst at Finvest, responsible for leading the market analysis and the identification of investment opportunities. Responsible for developing a platform thesis for regional healthcare networks (encompassing hospitals, specialized clinics and adjacent business opportunities) in Brazil as well as monitoring and providing management support to portfolio companies. Augusto holds a M.Sc. in Economics from Sao Paulo School of Economics (FGV), B.S. in Economics from the same institution and a B.S. in Physics from USP.

Maximiliano Sánchez Lama

Scientific Analyst

Maximiliano Sánchez Lama

Scientific Analyst

PhD in Biological Sciences with 9+ years research experience and translational biotechnology applications. Carried out his research at the Molecular Biology Lab at Fundación Instituto Leloir. Areas of research include Molecular Biology, Plant Biology, and Eukaryots Biotechnology. Proficient in experimental design, DNA construction design and assembly, transgenesis, RNA and protein expression assays, Chemical screenings in biologic systems, statistical analysis, and biological interpretation.

Securitas BioSciences

Board and Advisory Board

Luis Claudio Garcia de Souza

Co-Founder and Chairman of the Board

Luis Claudio Garcia de Souza

Co-Founder and Chairman of the Board

Co-Founder and Chairman of Securitas BioSciences. Luis Claudio is the Founder and Chairman of FINVEST, Luís Claudio serves as Chairman of Captalys, having been its founder and CEO. In the last 15 years, Luis Claudio also founded and built other financial services companies such as RB Capital, Rio Bravo Investimentos and UBF Seguros. Prior to that, for 8 years, he was a senior partner and a member of the Executive Committee of Banco Pactual, where he held positions such as head of corporate origination, head of distribution and head of the structured finance. Before joining Banco Pactual, for 9 years, he was a Managing Director and partner of Banco BBM Investimentos as well as CEO of its insurance affiliate. Luís Cláudio was a Board Member of BOVESPA for two terms and member of the Advisory Board of Securitas Capital, the private equity arm of Swiss Re. Luís Cláudio holds a degree in Civil Engineering from PUC-Rio and master's degree in Systems and Transportation Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Martha Farmer, PhD

Board member and Chairman Advisory Board

Martha Farmer, PhD

Board member and Chairman Advisory Board

Martha C. Farmer, PhD, co-founded North Shore InnoVentures, a non-profit business incubator in Beverly, MA, that is the 2018 winner of the "Dinah Adkins Technology Incubator of the Year" award from the International Business Innovation Association (InBIA). The incubator is dedicated to innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic development through fostering life sciences and cleantech start-ups. The incubator has so far enrolled 59 startups that have collectively raised $414M and created 368 jobs. Dr. Farmer served as President and CEO from 2008 until 2018 and still serves on the Board of Directors. She also serves on the Boards of Directors of the North Shore Technology Council and three companies, Atentiv, TSRL, and Pneuma Systems, and serves on the Scientific Advisory Boards of Virtech Bio and Securitas BioSciences. In addition she serves on the Board of Advisors and on the Institutional Review Board of Endicott College and on the Ethics Committee of Northeast Hospital Systems. She recently completed a five-year term on the Board of Trustees of North Shore Community College. In 2012 she founded the Life Sciences Consortium of the North Shore, comprised of the incubator, Endicott College, Gordon College, North Shore Community College, Salem State University and the Gloucester Marine Genomics Institute, in order to strengthen the training of the future workforce for the local life sciences cluster. For her work to promote innovation, entrepreneurship and economic development on the North Shore, Endicott College awarded her Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters and the North Shore Chamber of Commerce honored her as a North Shore Distinguished Leader. Her biotech industry career began with the launch of Baxter Healthcare’s Hemoglobin Therapeutics Division in 1987, which she helped grow from 3 people to 130 over ten years. Subsequently, Dr. Farmer co-founded the radiopharmaceutical start-up, BetaGamma LLC. She earned a BS in zoology and a PhD in physiology and pharmacology from Duke University, did postdoctoral training at Johns Hopkins University and was a Medical Ethics Fellow at Harvard University. She is an author on more than 30 publications and three patents.

Shawn G. Bengtson, RQAP-GLP

Quality Assurance Advisor

Shawn G. Bengtson, RQAP-GLP

Quality Assurance Advisor

Shawn Bengtson, RQAP-GLP, is the Director of Quality Assurance, Quality Systems Management and Research Operations Management at the University of Pittsburgh. Over the past twenty years, he has served as the primary architect in the development, implementation and management of Quality Systems that are fit for purpose in multiple academic centers. Centers include the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Center for Vaccine Research/University of Pittsburgh’s Regional Biocontainment Laboratory, and the Michigan-Pitt-Wyss Craniofacial Regenerative Medicine Interdisciplinary Translational Projects Program’s QA Core. Shawn serves as Senior Advisor for the SHARE/MediCiti Institute of Medical Sciences, India. Prior to joining the University of Pittsburgh, Bengtson spent 14 years at the National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) Life Sciences Division supporting Domestic and International Spaceflight Programs focused on lower earth orbit micro-gravity research. In 2017, Shawn established Bengtson Consulting, LLC, providing Quality Systems development and management support for start-ups in the biotech manufacturing and R&D space.

Adriana Machado

Advisory Board member

Adriana Machado

Advisory Board member

Adriana Machado is a celebrated woman business leader in Latin America and an outspoken advocate of the impact economy. She is a former CEO of GE Brazil and founder of Briyah Institute, a Benefit Corporation that bridges innovation, practice & purpose with a systems thinking approach. She serves on advisory boards, and she is a strategic partner at WOMB Group. She is also a supporter of the Brain Health Project (BHP), an initiative aimed at preventing Alzheimer’s Disease by promoting brain health and slowing cognitive decline. Her cross-cultural and cross-sector skills --from big business, government and nonprofit-- grants her a unique perspective towards entrepreneurship, resilience and leadership.

Securitas BioSciences

Company Leaders

Dr Osvaldo Podhajcer

Thera Signa leader

Dr Osvaldo Podhajcer

Thera Signa leader

Osvaldo L. Podhajcer completed his studies as Bachellor of Sciences and Master of Sciences in Israel. In 1987 he obtained his PhD in Biological Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires. Between 1989 and 1992 he completed a postdoctoral degree in Strasbourg, France. Since 1992, he is a member of the CONICET Investigator Career, of which he is currently a Senior Investigator. He was Professor of Cellular Biology and Applied Genomics at the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires from 1996 to 2008. From 1997 he directs the Laboratory of Molecular and Cellular Therapy of the Leloir Institute. He is co-author of more than 80 works in scientific journals, many of them of high international impact (Nature, Nature Medicine, Cancer Cell, Nature Reviews in Immunology and others), in addition to having written 5 chapters in specialty books. He offered more than 100 conferences nationally and internationally. He is a member of the “National Commission of Regenerative Therapies and Stem Cells” and was during 2010 Coordinator of the Health Bureau in the “Preparation of the National Plan of Science, Technology and Innovation 2012-2015”, of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation Productive of the Nation (Mincyt). Director of the genomic platform "Argentine Consortium of Genomic Technology". Osvaldo is the coordinator for Argentina of the United States-Latin America Cancer Research Network initiative co-sponsored by the Mincyt and the National Cancer Institute of the United States.

Dr Claudio Cavasotto

Meton AI Leader

Dr Claudio Cavasotto

Meton AI Leader

Dr. Claudio Cavasotto is a specialist in computational simulation of biomachromolecules, computer-aided drug design and biomedical informatics. He is Principal Investigator of CONICET and scientific director of the Institute of Applied Artificial Intelligence of the Universidad Austral.He obtained his Bachelor's degree in Physics from the University of Buenos Aires, and his PhD in Physics from the same institution. He completed postdoctoral studies at The Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla, California) in the area of computational biology and biophysics; He then joined MolSoft LLC (San Diego, CA) as a senior researcher, and worked there for five years. From 2007 to 2012 he was an associate professor at the School of Biomedical Informatics of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (Houston, TX), and since then he belongs to the career of the scientific researcher at CONICET.He has published more than 75 papers in leading scientific journals, and the book In Silico Drug Discovery and Design: Theory, Methods, Challenges, and Applications.

Jhonata Emerick

RAD2 Leader

Jhonata Emerick

RAD2 Leader

Aeronautical engineer from the University of São Paulo (USP) with two master's degrees in Quantitative Finance and Mathematical Economics, the first by the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) and the second by the National Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics (IMPA). He started his career at Embraer and later migrated to the financial market. He was an analyst at Rio Bravo Investimentos and the Ambipar group, as well as a Data Scientist at Itaú. In October 2014 he founded an urban logistics startup, 99motos, which in 2016 merged with Rapiddo and was sold to IFood in 2018. In 2016 he sold to the CheckExpress Group an Analytics startup called Prediction. He is currently preparing his doctoral thesis in A.I. for the analysis of medical images to defend at Poli-USP. He was also co-founder of two other startups focused on artificial intelligence: DataRisk (risk area) and RadSquare (medical area). He currently conducts work in the medical field with both companies. At DataRisk, it creates predictive models for the most diverse diseases based on public health data from the Government - DataSus and works together with the Sanofi laboratory to help locate people with rare diseases in Brazil. At RadSquare, the first SpinOff of Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein, develops research and products in the areas of mental health, radiology and sports medicine. He is the current President of ABRIA - Brazilian Association of artificial intelligence -, responsible for spreading knowledge and assisting the government in designing the Brazilian strategy for the use of technology. He wrote the first book in Portuguese on econometrics using Eviews by the Saint Paul publishing house.

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