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“Welcome!” to our new colleagues - Sjaak Bot and Paul de Vries
We are happy to welcome Sjaak and Paul who joined Lygature at the start of 2021! You can meet them below and find out more about their background, expertise and new responsibilities within the Lygature team.
As of December 1, 2020, Sjaak Bot joined Lygature as Senior Regulatory Expert. At a local level, Sjaak serves as a Board Member for Janssen Biologics BV in Leiden. He is also member of the Strategic Management Board of the Janssen Campus in the Netherlands. Sjaak joined Johnson & Johnson in 2002 as Head of Regulatory Affairs Europe for Centocor, which transitioned into Janssen GRA-EMEA Immunology in 2008. Since March 2020 Sjaak Bot is Senior Advisor Global Regulatory Affairs for Janssen. In that role he leads several global business-improvement initiatives for Janssen and Johnson & Johnson Regulatory Affairs. In 2013, he was appointed to his previous role as Head of Janssen EMEA Regulatory Affairs, covering all therapeutic areas, as well as the EMEA OpCo Regulatory teams.
Under his leadership, EMEA Regulatory Affairs successfully obtained approvals in EMEA for new products and major line extensions including major brands like Remicade, Stelara, Imbruvica, Darzalex and most recently Spravato. Sjaak developed a strong EMEA regulatory team, and he initiated several key strategic initiatives within Janssen GRA.
Before joining Johnson & Johnson in 2002, Sjaak held leadership positions in regulatory affairs, quality and reimbursement in Yamanouchi Europe and Sanofi in the Netherlands. Besides his roles at Janssen, Sjaak is Senior Regulatory Expert at Lygature and Member of the Steering Committee of the Regulatory Science Network in the Netherlands. Sjaak has a Pharmacist Degree from the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. Within Lygature Sjaak will be involved in the RADAR-CNS project where wearables are tested in the diagnosis and treatment of mental health disorders.
Paul de Vries joined Lygature in January as a Program Operations Manager and will start working on the BIGPICTURE project (digital pathology) and RADAR-AD (using wearables to aid Alzheimer diagnosis). An important part of this new function will be to support the optimization of Lygature’s processes, operations and infrastructure. Paul obtained a Bachelor’s degrees in Human Geography (UU) and Psychobiology (UvA) and a Master’s degree in Molecular Neuroscience (UvA), including a major oriented towards policy and management in the life sciences. The past two years he has been active as a Grant Writing Consultant at Catalyze, being involved in successful proposals in a broad range of health science topics.
This taught him how to independently write and coordinate grant applications. At Lygature he hopes to make the next step in his career, further expanding his skillset in coordinating and supporting innovative science that can make a difference for the patients of the future.