Attila Berces

I currently focus on the development of HoloGRAFT, a donor-derived cell-free DNA test for transplant monitoring.

Omixon was acquired by Werfen in October 2024. I stay at Omixon, now part of Werfen to help our pre- and post-transplant products to make an impact in the lives of transplant recipients.

I lead Omixon through the COVID years and through the acquisition by Werfen in October 2024. In 2020, we brought a COVID test to market, which funded our RnD costs to develop new products to improve transplant outcomes. We developed NanoTYPE, the first HLA typing with full gene coverage, and HoloGRAFT, a post-transplant monitoring test.

Led the licensing negotiation of HLA reagents from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and thus established the basis for first-in-class and best-in-class product in next generation sequencing-based human leukocyte antigen typing. Holotype has become a market-leading product in its class, validated in 24+ laboratories, and on over 26000 alleles with unmatched analytical performance.

I founded Omixon to develop software tools that helps clinical and diagnostic labs to adopt next generation sequencing. Omixon's focus has always been accurate and validated NGS data analysis. The strategy was to find under-served profitable niches where analysis accuracy is highly important, valuable and non-trivial task. Transplantation genetics or HLA typing has become a key focus area of the company. Omixon has become a leader in human leukocyte antigen typing using next generation sequencing data. Developed relationships with key opinion leaders in the field and particularly with Professor Dimitri Monos at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Lead the company to change the business model from software to full product (reagents+software) development.

Semmelweis Innovations aims to help university inventors and innovators to commercialize their technology. In addition to technology transfer responsibilities SI had practical educational programs. I helped to bring some methods I learned at Chalmers School of Entrepreneurship and Gothenborg International Bioscience Business School to Semmelweis Innovations. I facilitated high level talks between these schools about joined entrepreneurship training programs. As a consultant I played a key role in the development of an entrepreneurship training program and contributed as a lecturer, instructor, trainer or mentor. I helped several life-science and technology projects in their commercialization effort. The Kinepict team has received the Semmelweis Innovation Prize and I helped them to finalize the business model and obtain capital funding.

I founded Chemistry Logic to bring the benefits of field programmable gate arrays to drug discovery. Chemistry logic received government funding in collaboration with evopro and Budapest University of Technology and Economics. The company and its partners have developed scientific algorithms with groundbreaking performance. Our solution for chemical library-to-library comparison reached 1000-times the computational performance of the fastest CPUs. This solution solved the problem of compound acquisition for screening libraries in pharmaceutical research, where half of the acquired compounds were wasted, but they did not know which half. Pharmaceutical companies reached the physical limits of managing millions of compounds by 2008. A leading pharma company made a financial write-off of multiple $100M in compound libraries in 2009. [info: MIPTEC 2010 presentation by Jens Lesel ] Chemistry Logic developed a solution that could have prevented large pharma companies to get into this problem in the first place and cold have saved $Bs on screening library acquisition, but the solution arrived too late. Chemistry Logic won several business plan competitions, including prizes at the Intel-Berkeley Innovation Challenge. The core of the Chemistry Logic team continued to work together in Omixon.

At Astra Zeneca, in my scientific leadership role I managed the growth of the Computational Chemistry section from 11 to 15 permanent staff in addition to serving on the management team of a department of 200+ mostly Ph.D. scientists. The number patent contributions of my section increased from two in 2002 to ten in 2003.

At Novartis, I supported six drug discovery programs with computational chemistry and modeling insight and made one key contribution to a development compound. I developed the concept, assembled a team to develop novel methods to model protein structure and protein-ligand interactions. Novartis rewarded this work by the “Bright Idea” corporate-level innovation award.

As a researcher at the Steacie Institute for Molecular Sciences of the National Research Council (Canada), I developed computational algorithms for conformational analysis, reaction path following, transition state and geometry optimization and molecular dynamics. I supported various biology programs including a synthetic vaccine design project. My work significantly contributed to the understanding of how to eliminate the acyl transfer side reaction in the polymer-supported synthesis of the single repeat unit of the capsular polysaccharide of Streptococcus B. Most of my 50+ research publications date back to these five years at NRC. I developed collaborative relationships with Dennis Whitfield at the Institute of Biological Science and Tomo Nukada at RIKEN Institute in Japan in carbohydrate chemistry, with David Case at The Scripps Research Institute in transition metal complexes especially as they are relevant for enzymatic reactions, and with Professor Toshikazu Ebisuzaki of RIKEN Institute and his group, who developed the Molecular Dynamics Gravity Pipe (MDGRAPE) hardware to speed up molecular simulations. Working at the Natural Research Council was my inspiration for entrepreneurship. This is where I received my first formal training of entrepreneurship and I have witnessed the commercial success of the vaccine project I contributed to and I experienced the formation of 58 spin-off companies from NRC with $300M capital invested in them.

I worked with Tom Ziegler, the third most cited chemist in Canada, in density functional theory. This is a quantum mechanical model for small molecules. I developed algorithms for the coupled-perturbed Kohn-Sham equations which can be used for simulation of vibrational spectroscopy. These algorithms are still maintained after twenty years in the Amsterdam Density Functional software commercialized by Scientific Computing and Modeling.