Sebastiaan Theuns

Sebastiaan Theuns graduated as a veterinarian from Ghent University in 2010 and has five years of postdoctoral experience. He is an expert in next- and third-generation sequencing for diagnostics of viral enteric and respiratory disease complexes in veterinary medicine. He will be CEO of a new spin-off company, PathoSense, from the Laboratory of Virology of Prof. Hans Nauwynck (CSO) and the UGent-PROVAXS consortium in 2020. PathoSense helps veterinarians and pharmaceutical companies worldwide with diagnostics & analysis of infectious disease problems. PathoSense does this by offering a complete sample-collection-to-diagnostic interpretation platform. As an award, PathoSense was selected for participation in the prestigious Belgian MedTechAccelerator program in 2018. Recently, PathoSense was selected for 1-year participation in the largest Belgian startup accelerator program, StartIt@KBC, part of Global Accelerator Network GAN. Before, Sebastiaan successfully defended his PhD in 2015 at Ghent University. He is (co)-author of >20 scientific publications, filed one patent application and was co-promotor of 1 PhD thesis. He gained expertise in vaccine development by conducting postdoctoral research (VLAIO Innovation Mandate) towards the development of a rotavirus vaccine for swine. He was also the driving force behind an agricultural trajectory on porcine rotavirus infections in collaboration with the Flemish pig industry.