Bio
Ana is a drug discovery strategist, working with drug developers and rare disease foundations to develop new orphan drugs for epilepsy and rare neurological diseases.
Ana has 15 years of broad operational experience in biotech-pharma R&D and strategy (first at UCB Pharma and since 2014 as an independent consultant through her firm Dracaena Consulting), spanning indication selection, preclinical, clinical, regulatory and commercial stages. She has supported numerous programs at 15 bio-pharmaceutical companies, including 3 currently approved drugs and one preclinical-to-Phase 3 program.
Ana is also a strong advocate for patient engagement in drug discovery and development (see eBook #ImpatientRevolution). She is the Chief Development Officer of the Loulou Foundation, Chief of Translational Science of CureSHANK, Scientific Director of the DHPS Foundation and former Scientific Director of the Dravet Syndrome Foundation Spain and an advisor to other rare disease foundations. Through these roles, Ana helps build under-developed rare disease fields to accelerate the development of new treatments.
Ana is a neuroscientist by training. She received her PhD in neuroscience from the University of Barcelona in Spain (2006), and completed an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada (2006-2009).
Affiliations
Content
Presentations
2023 - Tratamientos para SYNGAP1: dónde estamos y hacia dónde vamos [Español] SRF
2023 - CDKL5 Deficiency Disorder treatment pipeline - CDKL5 Alliance conference
2022 - Patient community driven alliances, presented at the Patient Engagement in 2030 meeting, Utrecht
2022 - La Importancia del movimiento asociativo - EPIGENS
2021 - Retos de la terapia génica y medicina de precisión desde el punto de vista del movimiento asociativo - Sociedad Española de Epilepsia
2021 - El futuro de los tratamientos para los síndromes con epilepsia refractaria - EpiBilbao
2020 - Epilepsy Therapies in Development - Cleveland Clinic Epilepsy Genetics Update
2019 - Patient groups partnering in the drug development process - RAREsummit 19 by Cambridge Rare Disease Network
2019 - From seizures to genes: how Dravet syndrome is changing the way we treat epilepsy - Madrid
2018 - World Orphan Drug Congress (WODC) - Barcelona
2018 - 1st Metting in Translational Pharmacology - Santiago
2018 - Eurordis Winter School - Paris
2017 - World Orphan Drug Congress (WODC) - Barcelona
2017 - Cambridge International Rare Disease Summit - Cambridge UK
2017 - Inaugural Symposium of the Austrian Platform for Personalized Medicine - Vienna
2017 - Rare disease symposium: the rare disease patient in 2030 - Amsterdam
2016 - European Congress on Epileptology (ECE) - Prague
2016 - European Conference on Rare Diseases (ECRD) - Edinburgh
2015 - Big Data in Health Care - Luxembourg
2015 - World Orphan Drug Congress (WODC) - Geneva
2015 - Orphan Drug Summit - Copenhagen
2015 - The Future of Refractory Epilepsy Syndromes - Madrid
Where to find me