Silke Beaucamp, Diploma Economist, is Legal and Economic Managing Director of DNTOX GmbH. Since 2003, she has been working as an independent management consultant. She accompanies start-ups from the high-tech sector during their founding and growth phase in the areas of business model development, business plan development, funding, financing, corporate development and human resources.

Silke Beaucamp worked for more than 8 years in marketing and business development for various international pharmaceutical companies. She then took over the management of a management consultancy and seed capital company specializing in high-tech industries in Leverkusen.

Silke Beaucamp has, among other things, successfully built up several companies with the HTGF. She is a jury member of the Gründerstipendium NRW, and a reviewer and mentor in the business plan competitions Science4Life and the Aachen start-up and growth competition AC². She is a mentor of the HIGH-TECH.NRW Start-Up Business Accelerator. Among other things, Ms. Beaucamp accompanies funding projects from the VIP+, EXIST and EFRE, e. g. START-UP-Transfer.NRW programs as well as the EASME program of the European Commission as a mentor and coach.

Managing Director

Contact
E-Mail: silke.beaucamp@dntox.de
Phone: +49 151 25327721

Dr. Katharina Koch is the head of research and development of DNTOX and the commissarial head of the working group ‚Development of Alternative Methods for Environmental Toxicity Testing‘ at the IUF – Leibniz Research Institute for Environmental Medicine in Düsseldorf. Her research focusses on the development of test methods for endocrine disruption (ED)-mediated developmental neurotoxicity (DNT). She has extensive experience studying hormonal dependencies of neurodevelopmental key processes in different human primary and iPSC-derived neural 3D models. Prior to that, she received her Ph.D. degree from the Heinrich-Heine University of Duesseldorf for her work on the development of novel therapies targeting chemo-resistant tumor stem cells in malignant brain tumors. Katharina Koch received a B.S. degree in Biology and a M.Sc. degree in Molecular Biomedicine from the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Bonn. She is involved in several validation management groups of PEPPER, a French public private platform for the pre-validation of endocrine test methods.

Head of Research & Development

Contact
E-Mail: katharina.koch@dntox.de
Phone: +49 211 16786306

Dr. Kristina Bartmann is co-founder of DNTOX GmbH and Head of Research and Development since March 2023. Her expertise lies in the development of test methods for developmental (DNT) and adult neurotoxicity (ANT), that are based on the measurement of electrical activity of neural networks. During her PhD in the group of Ellen Fritsche, she worked with both human primary and iPSC-derived 3D neural models, as well as 2D neural co-cultures. She has extensive experience in organizing, conducting, and evaluating large compound screenings, as well as in transferring in vitro assay methods. Kristina Bartmann received a B.Sc. degree in Biology from the University of Cologne and a M.Sc. degree in Biology with a focus on Biomedicine from the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf.

Head of Research & Development

Contact
E-Mail: kristina.bartmann@dntox.de
Phone: +49 211 16786306

Dr. Jördis Klose is the project manager and laboratory head of DNTOX since mid of 2022. Since 2016, she already has been working with the human primary and iPSC-derived neuronal 3D models and has extensive expertise in the field of toxicological testing of different substance classes regarding their impact on various neurodevelopmental key events. Jördis Klose received a B.Sc. degree in Biology and a M.Sc. degree in Toxicology from the Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf, where she also successfully accessed her Ph.D degree. Both, her master thesis and dissertation are focused on toxicological substance testing, which she further deepened with transcriptome- and mode-of-action analyses. For DNTOX, in addition to substance testing, she is also involved in the development of new test methods.

Laboratory Head & Project Management

Contact
E-Mail: joerdis.klose@dntox.de
Phone: +49 211 16786306

Farina Bendt is employed as a technical assistant at DNTOX. Since 2014 she has been employed at the IUF – Leibniz Institute for Research in Environmental Medicine in Düsseldorf in the working group of Prof. Fritsche. There she gained extensive experience with various human primary and iPSC-derived neural 3D models.

She previously worked as a Technical Officer at Charles River in the Virus Validation Studies Division. After completing her training as a biology laboratory assistant at Bayer, she worked at the medical laboratories in Düsseldorf. There she carried out investigations for viral diseases and genetic mutations by means of purification and real-time PCR, as well as sequencing.

Laboratory Head

Contact
E-Mail: farina.bendt@dntox.de
Phone: +49 211 16786306

Dr. Arif Dönmez is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Research Institute for Environmental Medicine (IUF) in Düsseldorf, Germany, and a co-founder of DNTOX. Arif received his undergraduate and graduate in Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Wuppertal, Germany, followed by a PhD and PostDoc in the Algebra working group at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, where he worked on moduli spaces for linear algebra type classification problems. Dönmez’s research spans biostatistics, cognitive science and artificial intelligence. He reverse engineers human intelligence to develop algorithms that emulate human-like reasoning, ultimately benefiting computational biology.

Head of Computational Biology

Contact
E-Mail: arif.doenmez@dntox.de
Phone: +49 211 16786306

Prof. Dr. Axel Mosig is a Professor for Bioinformatics at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, and a co-founder of DNTOX. His research is focused on hypothesis-centric approaches for the analysis of microscopic image data. Axel received his undergraduate and graduate education in Computer Science at the University of Bonn, followed by a postdoc position at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Prior to joining Ruhr-University Bochum in 2011, was a founding member and principal investigator at the CAS-Max Planck Partner Institute for Computational Biology (PICB). Axel’s research covers the whole range from the theory underlying image analysis algorithms to translating these algorithms into practical applications. His research is driven by the overarching quest to understand how computational models relate to and affect the experimental life sciences.

Scientific Advisor Bioinformatics

Contact
E-Mail: axel.mosig@dntox.de
Phone: +49 211 16786306