Our team

Mr Renaat Baes has over twenty years of experience in pharmaceutical Manufacturing and Supply Chain Operations. He joins Mithra from Takeda, where he held different Project, Process and Production positions gaining a broad experience in different technologies (e.g. hormones, solid dosage, sterile manufacturing).

As Plant Director for 8 years in the Brussels Manufacturing site, Renaat led several strategic site divestments for Takeda. Most recently he was responsible for the Global Business Process Redesign Project from a manufacturing and supply chain perspective, involving change management in several production sites. Renaat holds a Master in Pharmacy including post-graduate degrees in Industrial Pharmacy from Gent University and Business Management from KUL, Belgium.

M. Brands holds a bachelor’s degree from the university of Liège ( Belgium) in Public Health with a major in Epidemiology and Health Economics and has over 10 years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry. His area of expertise covers Regulatory Affairs, Quality Assurance and Supply Chain.

M. Brands started his career at Astra Zeneca in a commercial role and joined Mithra in 2009 to take growing responsibilities in the Quality Assurance and Regulatory Affairs department. After developing the Quality Assurance activity at Mithra as QA Manager he progressively transitioned to Supply Chain Manager to develop the whole Supply activities and manage the growing logistic and supply streams.

His deep knowledge of the logistical organisation within the company together with his sound experience in establishing and developing the Supply Chain activity allows M. Brands to take the role as Chief Supply Chain Officer at Mithra. In this position M. Brands will address the Mithra CDMO logistic and supply development , which is key to the company’s growth.

Stijn Vlaminck has over 20 years experience in IT, of which 17 within the Pharmaceutical sector.

After working in several IT positions at Siemens, GSK and UCB, he became Head of IT of the Alter Pharma Group.
Here he was able to implement serialization and acquire an in depth knowledge of the supply chain processes within the Pharma sector.

His overall IT, Supply Chain and Computerized System Validation knowledge make him the suited person to help Mithra and CDMO stay on top of the market and guide them to the future.

Alex has over 20 years of international experience in the materials and chemicals industries.

Alex has held individual contributor and management roles in R&D, new business development, strategy, M&A and investor relations at GE Plastics (now SABIC), BASF and Solvay across the US and Europe.

Alex joined Mithra in 2023 as Head of Investor Relations and Communications bringing his breadth of experience in IR and passion for life-improving chemistry to the role.

Alex earned his PhD in Chemistry in 2000 from Texas A&M University and received his MBA with a Finance concentration in 2006 from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Fanny Rozenberg has 12 years of experience in various legal positions. Fanny holds a qualification from the University of Liège. She initiated his career as a lawyer for 8 years, where she developed a legal practice focused on commercial, civil and insolvency law. She had been liquidator for the Liège Commercial Court and assistant in the general theory of obligations law department and judicial law department of the University of Liège for 8 years. She is still member of the University of Liège as lecturer.

She has joined Mithra in 2019 where she acted as General Counsel responsible for covering legal services in various matters. Her preferred areas of practice are business law, insolvency law, and contract and commercial law.

Catherine Lejeune holds a Master Degree in History of Art from the University of Liège (Belgium). She initiated her career as a secondary school French and History teacher, before moving into Human Resources. Catherine has over 8 years of experience in various HR topics, predominantly oriented towards the implementation of HR structures and policies.

Catherine joined Mithra in 2021 to take growing responsibilities in the HR Department. Her HR philosophy is based on building relationships of trust with both employees and management, in order to create an HR framework that makes sense and adds real value.

Frederique Depraetere has over twenty-five years of experience in communications and marketing.

He has worked across multiple industries including in healthcare, automotive, transport, electronics and supporting the launches of several start-ups. During that time, he has held several senior European and global positions including at Electrolux, Agfa HealthCare and Goodyear.

He has a Masters in Political Science from the VUB in Belgium and a Master of Arts in Conflict Management Studies from the University of Kent (UK).

Frederique joined Mithra in 2023.

Maud Jost is graduated in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Liege (Belgium), and also obtained a PhD in Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences with her research mainly focused on oncology in Professor Foidart’s lab, before joining the pharmaceutical/biotech industry.

She has over 15 years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry starting at SGS Lab Simon as Toxicology Lab supervisor and Preclinical Project Manager and joining Mithra in 2009 to take growing responsibilities in the R&D department and focusing Product Development and Project Management.

Christophe Saillez is Head of Regulatory Affairs. Industrial engineer in biochemistry, he has been active in the pharmaceutical industry for more than 25 years.

Following a long career performing various regulatory and quality-validation functions at GSK Vaccines, he held regulatory leadership and consultancy roles in different small and large pharmaceutical companies before joining Mithra end 2020.

Koen van Rossem, MD, MSc, PhD is pharmaceutical physician with 7 years of experience in basic research in academia and 30 years in nonclinical and clinical research in the pharma industry. He has held medical R&D leadership roles in small, mid-size and large companies including J&J, GSK, Stiefel and Barrier Therapeutics.

Dr van Rossem has a broad experience in preclinical drug discovery, cardiovascular safety pharmacology, early and late-stage clinical development, drug safety and pharmacovigilance, and advanced therapy medicinal products (cell and gene therapy) in various therapeutic areas including dermatology, infectious diseases, neurology, lysosomal storage diseases and primary immune deficiencies. Over the past 12 years he has been focusing on drug development for rare diseases and has supported several Biotech companies as consultant. Dr van Rossem joined Mithra in November 2022 to lead the Medical Operations group.

Dr van Rossem obtained a MD degree at the University of Ghent (Belgium), a Master degree in biomedical and pharmaceutical research and a PhD in the field of neurology at the University of Brussels (Belgium).

Stefan Leurs holds a PhD in organic chemistry from the university of Leuven and has 28 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry. His area of expertise covers all technical aspects and project management of CMC development activities and technical support of commercial production. After postdocs at the universities of Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium) and Stuttgart (Germany), Mr Leurs joined Janssen Pharmaceutica in Belgium in 1995. His career started in API development and evolved into different local and global management roles in different CMC functions at Janssen.

Mr Leurs joined Mithra in 2021 to assume the role of Head of CMC Development. In this position, Mr Leurs will oversee all the CMC development strategies of the products in the Mithra portfolio as well as the execution thereof.