Board of Directors

Eleni Pentafragka was born and raised in Athens. As an undergraduate student, she studied in parallel Law at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (LLB) and International Business & European Affairs (BSc) at The American College of Greece (DEREE). She continued her post-graduate studies in International Health Policy at the London School of Economics (LSE) and she is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Biotechnology at Northeastern University. Her professional career started as legal advisor at the pharmaceutical company WinMedica and she later joined ELPEN, where she took over the management of legal and corporate affairs. Her main areas of focus cover public policy, market access, corporate communication and human resources. Since March 2023, she is Chief Strategy Officer & Board Member at ELPEN. She is an active member in the “Healthcare & Life Sciences” Working group of the Hellenic Federation of Enterprises (SEV) and the Innovative Greeks. She supports initiatives that advance innovation in health and life sciences, as well as initiatives that empower women in the professional environment. She is an active member in national and European organizations and institutions responsible for pharmaceutical policy.

Achilleas Gravanis, Professor of Pharmacology Medical School University of Crete and Researcher at the Institute of Molecular Biology & Biotechnology-FORTH. He served as member of the Biomedical Research Program Committee of the European Commission, as member of the Hellenic Council of the Higher Education Quality Assurance Authority (ADIP) and President of the Sectional Committee of Life Sciences Hellenic National Research & Technology Council (ESET), also member of the Council of the Hellenic Research & Innovation Foundation (ELIDEK), responsible for Life Sciences. Affiliated Research Professor Center for Drug Discovery, Northeastern University Boston. Co-founder of biotechnology spinoffs BioNature and ReNeuroCell. Affiliated Principal Investigator Emulate spin-off WYSS/Harvard. Venture partner at BigPi Ventures. His research group is developing synthetic compounds, agonists of neurotrophin receptors, with neuroprotective and neurogenic properties and potential applications in therapeutics of neurodegenerative diseases. Additionally, his group is focusing on 3D microscaffold bioengineering and neural stem cell technologies to develop neuroimplants for spinal cord injury and brain trauma and neurobiosensors for drug discovery.

Dr. Iliopoulos is the founder and CEO of Athos Therapeutics Inc, a company based in Los Angeles, CA, USA, developing new treatments for autoimmune diseases with the aid of artificial intelligence algorithms. He was a Professor at Harvard Medical School and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute as well as at the UCLA School of Medicine, where he founded and directed the Center for Systems Biomedicine, UCLA. He also received an MBA from the Anderson School of Management, UCLA as well as he studied economics at Stanford University and artificial intelligence at MIT. He has significant activity in the field of new drug development for various types of cancer and autoimmune diseases and has received awards from international organizations such as the US National Institute of Research (USA) and the Eli & Edythe Broad Foundation.

Dr. Tzannis is an executive and entrepreneur with over 28 years of pharmaceutical industry experience from target selection, drug discovery to advanced clinical development. He is the Founder, past President & CEO and until recently the COO of Aeovian Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a San Francisco Bay-area venture focusing on the discovery and development of innovative therapeutics to treat rare and age-related diseases. Prior to Aeovian, he served as Entrepreneur in Residence and Director of Clinical Sciences at the Buck Institute for Research in Aging, leading efforts to translate fundamental aging research innovations to human proof of concept; the founder and CEO of ARdaix Pharmaceuticals SAS and co-founder and COO of Theralpha SAS. Both of these roles focused on the development of novel therapeutics for the management of acute and chronic pain. Leading to that, Dr. Tzannis served as member of the executive team and Vice President of Pharmaceutical R&D at AcelRx Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Vice President of R&D at iMEDD Inc.; Director of R&D and Licensing & Acquisitions at Nektar Therapeutics, while he started his career as Research Scientist & Group Leader at Alza Corporation. He holds numerous patents and applications, peer-reviewed publications and has received funding grants from both government and private foundations. He holds MS/PhD and Dipl.Eng. degrees in Chemical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, NY) and NTUA (Athens, Greece), respectively.

Dimitris Tryfon is VP at Winmedica, a modern and fast growing pharma company in Greece (150 employees, €100M revenues) that specialises in cardiovascular, oncology and rare diseases. Winmedica is now building a state of the art oncology facility in Tripoli, Greece. He is also a partner at T-Life Capital (https://tlifecapital.com) which is an investment company that focuses on start-ups, scale-ups and real estate. Notable health-related investments include : Saphetor (a precision-medicine company dedicated to large-scale identification and interpretation of human genetic variants by leveraging proprietary algorithms and expert domain knowledge), Dyania health (An Al research company that has developed a computational-based platform to identify patients who match a complex set of criteria to participate in clinical trials) and Cellestia Biotech (which is pioneering innovative therapeutics based on novel modes of action to treat autoimmune diseases and multi-drug resistant cancers). He also sits on the Board of Ble Kedros, a publicly listed Real Estate Investment Trust based in Athens, Greece. He holds a Bsc in Environmental science from the University of Brighton.