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.

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.

Yiannis Roufos is the founder of IR-ADVICE, a consulting company offering support to companies involved in the Health Industry. He is a graduate of the School of Pharmacy, of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He earned his Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry from the College of Pharmacy, The University of Iowa, IA, USA on drug design and synthesis of molecules acting in the CNS. He was a member of Dr Monroe Wall’s research team at the Research Triangle Institute, RTP, NC, USA. Dr Wall was the discoverer of Taxol and Camptothecin molecules and their anticancer activity. From there he moved to Ann Arbor, MI and did research at the PARKE-DAVIS Central Research Laboratories as a member of the Neurochemistry Department. Upon his return to Greece he held positions  in the Marketing and Sales Departments of Bristol Myers Squibb (Business Unit Director) and then for 25 years at ELPEN Pharmaceuticals, as Director of North Greece.