Sander Van Deventer

Biography

 Sander van Deventer is a founder and managing partner of Forbion Capital Partners. He serves as a non-executive on the boards of Argos Therapeutics, Inc., giCare Inc., Hookipa AG, uniQure NV and enGene, Inc. Sander is a professor in Translational Gastroenterology at the University of Leiden and an accomplished scientist: he has authored more 400 peer review scientific papers and supervised more than 40 PhD students. Sander van Deventer, a certified internist and gastroenterologist, received his medical degree and doctorate (of philosophy) from the University of Amsterdam, after defending a thesis on the biological activities of bacterial lipopolysaccharides in humans. Following board certification in internal medicine and gastroenterology, he worked as a scientist in the Laboratory for Medical Biochemistry, Rockefeller University, New York. 

Research Interest

 He was the first to administer an anti-TNF monoclonal antibody (later registered as Remicade®) to patients with Crohn’s disease, the first to infuse apolipoprotein A1 in humans and played a critical role in the development of other therapeutic interventions, targeting cytokines, cytokine receptors, T-cells and signal transduction pathways, using small molecules, antibodies, peptides, proteins and antisense DNA technologies. In 1995, he was appointed director of the laboratory for Experimental Internal Medicine at the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam, and continued to work on therapeutic signal transduction inhibition, gene therapies, and (genetically engineered) probiotics. From 2001 until 2004, he chaired the Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam. In 1998, he co-founded Amsterdam Molecular Therapeutics (AMT N.V.), currently uniQure B.V., which is developing AAV-based gene therapy products and is now listed on NASDAQ, he has acted subsequently as CSO, CMO and CEO. He supervised the development of Glybera, the first gene therapy product to be approved in Europe, as well as several other gene therapy products.