Valerie Vanhooren, PhD

Dr. Valerie Vanhooren is the co-founder and CEO of ONA Therapeutics, a biotechnology spin-off of the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies and Institute for Research in Biomedicine. ONA Tx specializes in the discovery and development of therapeutic biologics targeting tumor metastatic-initiating cells and lipid metabolism, and potentially multiple metastatic cancers. Valerie’s specialties lie in drug development from early stage discovery to phase II clinical trials and generating biologics against targets in a broad range of therapeutic and diagnostic areas. Valerie completed her PhD in biotechnology and postdoctoral research at Ghent University-VIB. Prior to co-founding ONA Tx in May of 2019, Valerie led project developments at Ablynx, a nanobodies-focused subsidiary of Sanofi, Intelligent Pharma, acquired by the bioinformatics company Mind the Byte, and ProteoDesign, a protein engineering platform spin-out from Princeton University.