My Story

Koen Kas is a healthcare futurist driven by the aim to make healthcare delightful, personalised, and ultimately preventive. He published his inspiring vision in 2 books. ‘Sick no more’ describes how we will transition from reactive sickcare to pro-active healthcare using digital health tools, datascience and omics insights, together with new design ideas. ‘Your guide to Delight’ is a roadmap towards creating health, dealing with change, introducing our personal Digital Twin as our permanent doctor keeping us healthy.

With Healthskouts, he inspires any healthcare stakeholder to Delight its customer – yes, also patients – using a newly developed Delight Thinking methodology. Healthskouts uncovers surprising insights and designs novel healthcare experiences. This way it helps its clients envision & validate unseen ways to compete in the scope of personalised, predictive and preventive health.

“Make healthcare delightful, personalised, and ultimately preventive”

Koen is guest professor Molecular Oncology & Didital health at the University of Ghent, Belgium. He chairs the scientific committee of the European Cancer Prevention Organisation. He is co-chair of the Healthcare & Life Sciences Working Group of the Digital Twin Consortium and advisor of the Digital Therapeutics Alliance (DTa). He is editor of the mHealth Journal & the European Journal of Cancer Prevention. He is an ambassador for health tech experience zone Health House and for VITO‘s citizen-centric data platform We Are (built on SOLID). He advises 5 pioneering healthcare companies, a startup incubator and an investor. He has over 300 international keynotes under his belt, including for many Fortune 500 companies.

Before, Koen spent 15 years in Executive positions at 4 leading biotech companies, combining that with academic cancer and omics research. As CSO Oncology of Thrombogenics he helped spin out Oncurious, developing a novel pediatric brain tumour drug into clinical trials. Koen was earlier founding CEO & CSO of Pronota, a protein biomarker company committed to better diagnosis and personalized medicine in the areas of ovarian cancer, preeclampsia, cardio-renal failure & sepsis. He was, prior to that Director drug discovery at Galapagos, one of the leading European life-sciences companies. Previously, he set up and directed the Cancer drug discovery program at Tibotec (now Johnson & Johnson).

“The future is no longer about being sick“

He received his PhD degree in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Antwerp where he also obtained a degree in Business Administration. In 1999 he was appointed professor at the University of Leuven, Belgium and lecturer at Harvard University, Boston, USA. He is author of over 60 publications in international journals in the field of cancer, biomarkers, human genomics and proteomics. He authored over 20 patents and patent applications. He is a member of different scientific societies and received prestigious awards from NATO and the Collen Research Foundation and from the Royal Belgian Academy of Sciences and the Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine.
He started his career at the Center of Human Genetics in Leuven, elucidating the molecular basis of salivary gland tumors and the hereditary endocrine tumor syndrome MEN1.