Bernard Peperstraete

Bernard Peperstraete, MD, is CEO and President of Acuamark Diagnostics, Inc. Acuamark Diagnostics was spun out of the Barany Labs at Weill Cornell Medicine, and focuses on developing a highly accurate, convenient and scalable test for early detection of cancer out of blood. Relative to other approaches in development for early cancer detection (traditional qPCR and NGS), AcuamarkDx proposes a differentiated solution. Acuamark Diagnostics' scientific and academic team is credited with inventing groundbreaking assays such as the ligase chain reaction (LCR), the ligase detection reaction (LDR), the universal array and qPCR (TaqMan). Prior to Acuamark Diagnostics, Bernard served as Acting President and CEO of ACT Biotech, a cancer pharmaceutical company, which was acquired by Eddingpharm. Earlier, Bernard was involved in healthcare venture capital for nearly a decade, most recently as a Partner at NGN Capital. As an investor, Bernard served on the boards of Potentia Pharma (now Apellis Pharma APLS:NASDAQ), Exosome Diagnostics and ACT Biotech (Eddingpharm), and was closely involved with a number of transactions, e.g. Maxcyte (MXCT:AIM), Santhera Pharma (SANN:SIX) and Artisan Pharma (acquired by AKP). Before completing his MBA at Harvard, Bernard was a Deputy Director at the Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH-CDC) in Singapore, and earlier, successfully co-founded and ran a contract research business, also in Singapore. In 1999, after serving as a physician, Dr. Peperstraete managed the HIV business unit at Bristol Myers & Squibb, Singapore, and worked on emerging market opportunities at Novartis, Basel.