Innovating Health Against Future Pandemics

Simona Mellino is Strategy and Business Enablement Lead at Roche Pharma, managing portfolio strategy and management. Prior to that, she was a Life Sciences Consultant, advising top pharmaceutical and medtech companies on commercial and digital strategies and focused on precision medicine in oncology and neurology. She worked at Accenture in the Life Sciences Strategy and Consulting practice. She has 8 years of experience in product development and launch across pharmaceuticals, medical devices, digital health categories and author of several publications in precision medicine (e.g., Nature Digital Medicine). She serves as Vice President of Women’s Brain Project, where she works on novel technologies for brain and mental health. She holds a Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry from Oxford University and a Master in Healthcare Management, Economics and Policy from SDA Bocconi with a specialization in market access and pricing.

Enrico Santus is Head of Human Computation in the CTO Office at Bloomberg, where he manages products and designs the long-term vision for human-machine interactions. In the last decade, he has been at the forefront of AI, developing and leading Microsoft products in Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). His education includes a PhD in NLP at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University on topics related to lexical semantics and ontology generation. After the PhD, he pursued three years of postdoctoral research between the SUTD and the CSAIL (MIT), actively contributing to the development and industrialization of AI solutions for medicine, pharma & crop science, as well as numerous COVID-19 initiatives, including the MIT tracing app. He was granted several awards (e.g., Stand Up to Cancer, Facebook, etc.) for his research, which counts over 75 papers and 1500 citations. He is advisor of several start-ups and has been an invited speaker on NLP at the White House. In the last years, he co-authored several fact-sheets for the US Congress and other regulators.

Dr. Chadha is a highly accomplished medical expert renowned for her work in neuroscience, neurological disorders, and psychiatric diseases. She co-founded and serves as the pro-bono CEO of the Women's Brain Project and is also the Vice-President at Euresearch. Recognized as a transformative leader and startup revitalizer, she has provided strategic guidance to CEOs, boards of directors, and junior colleagues. Her extensive career includes regulatory work at the Swiss Agency for Therapeutic Products and executive roles at Roche Diagnostic, Roche Pharmaceutical, and Biogen. She has even held the position of Chief Medical Officer and ad-interim CEO at Altoida.

Dr. Chadha has always been dedicated to solving the mysteries surrounding Alzheimer's and psychiatric conditions. Her research at the University of Zurich focused on immunotherapies for neurodegenerative disorders, contributing to the development of the first Alzheimer's disease-modifying treatment.

Her accomplishments have earned her numerous accolades, including being listed among Switzerland's Top 100 Women in Business since 2018 and being named Woman of the Year in Switzerland in 2019. She's received the World Sustainability Award for her contributions to Precision Medicine and the "Premio Medicina Italia" for her pandemic management efforts. In 2021, she was nominated among the top 10 innovative women in Switzerland, and in 2022, she received the Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Award, followed by the “Dean Martin” International Prize in 2023.

Dr. Chadha is passionate about eliminating bias in clinical development, aiming to achieve precision medicine. She advocates for the establishment of the first global sex and gender precision medicine research institute, based in Switzerland.

Beyond her professional achievements, Dr. Chadha is an author with contributions to scientific publications, TEDx talks, and books, including "Sex and Gender Differences in Alzheimer's Disease" and "Una Bambina Senza Testa”.

Dario Motti is a Team leader and Senior Consultant at Confinis AG, a global medtech consulting firm for medtech innovation. He has a PhD in Neuroscience and over 15 years of experience in pre-clinical and clinical research in academic and private organizations across multiple continents and countries. Over the course of his career, Dario worked on a diverse range of topics from genomics to gene therapy to drug development to digital biomarker, both for academic organizations and industry. He dedicated the last 7 years to the digital medicine space, supporting product teams in designing and executing regulatory and clinical strategy to deliver effective, beneficial, and impactful medical devices to patients and care teams worldwide. His experience, spans all aspects of digital health: over the years, he participated in and led the development, validation and commercialization of a diverse range of regulated digital products including Digital Endpoints, Digital Therapeutics (DTx), Remote Patients Monitoring solutions (RPMs), Clinical Decision Support tools and algorithms. He has an extensive publication record and has been an invited speaker at conferences in Europe, US and Japan.