Dr. Michael Ahrens, is an active orthopedic spine surgeon, currently practicing in Germany. He has experience working with start-up companies and has been on several scientific advisory boards of startup and large medical device companies. With a vision for innovations in the healthcare industry, Dr. Ahrens has developed over the last years the concept of SURGITENT® a single use sterile glovebox type surgical isolation system. As one of the founding members of the DRG committee of the German Spine Society (DWG), Dr. Ahrens has seen the full circle of bench to bed developments of medical devices and their respective challenges for reimbursement. He holds an MBA from IE University Madrid, Spain, is a certified International Regulatory Manager(TUV SUD) and has been inventor and coinventor of several patent applications.

Philippe Cattin was born in Switzerland in 1967. He received his B.Sc. degree from the University of Applied Science in Brugg/Windisch in 1991. In 1995 he received the M.Sc. degree in computer science and in 2003 the Ph.D. degree in robotics from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. From 2003 to 2007 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Computer Vision Laboratory at ETH Zurich. In 2007 he became an Assistant Professor at the University of Basel and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2015. He is the founder of the Center for medical Image Analysis and Navigation (CIAN) group at the Medical Faculty of the University of Basel. He is currently heading the recently founded Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Basel. Philippe just was this year a Research Fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston/MA.His research interests include medical image analysis, image-guided therapy, robotics-guided laser osteotomy and virtual reality. As a Principal Investigator he has finished many projects in these areas and published over 100 papers, patents and book chapters. He is also the founder of two spin-off companies and licensed his patents and software to medtech companies.

Beat is very experienced in the Medtech Industry. He used to work for companies like Disetronic and Ypsomed. Today he is the founder and CEO of confinis, a consultancy specializing in providing advice and services to the medical device, pharmaceutical, biotech and diagnostic industries. Further more he is member of the Board of Directors in several companies and an auditor for Medical Team of the Swiss Association for Quality and Management Systems (SQS). He is also Co-Founder of Medical Human Factors AG and a lecturer at Berne University of Applied Sciences as well as an Inspector at the World Health Organization (WHO).

Heiko has international experience in the health care sector, especially in the area of medical device technology. A Ph.D. in engineering obtained in the USA and a Swiss/US MBA degree combined with his professional experience allow him to relate to a broad spectrum of business areas. He served as CEO of a successful start-up company with an associated exit. Since then, he held various leadership positions with global players of the medical device industry. In 2012 he started VISARTIS Healthcare GmbH. Since 2017, he is also responsible for the Medtech part of the innovation agency of the canton of Bern. In addition, he is a CTI Startup Coach and has various board mandates of companies in medical devices as well as the FHNW and the Swiss Excellence Foundation.