AgroSavfe Strengthens its Management Team

AgroSavfe has announced that it strengthens its management team with Mrs. Maria Abad-Molina and Dr. Miguel De Bolle.

AgroSavfe has announced that Maria Abad-Molina and Miguel De Bolle are joining the management team. Mrs. Abad-Molina brings many years of experience in the area of product development and registration while Dr. De Bolle has significant expertise in crop protection product research.

Maria Abad-Molina is trained as an agronomical engineer and holds an Executive MBA from ESSEC, Paris and Mannheim Business School. She has over 20 years of professional experience in the crop protection and plant biotechnology industries.

Before joining the AgroSavfe management team, she was part of the management team of CropDesign, a BASF Plant Science company, representing the Global Strategic Asset Management function. Previously, within the BASF Crop Protection Division, she led global activities for placing plant protection products in the market, including the top sales herbicide.

She also supported the business on life cycle management, post-patent strategies and partnering under risk & value sharing models, and represented the company at the European Crop Protection Association and CropLife International industry associations. Maria started her career at Monsanto and was involved in the development of new active substances.

She then held different R&D positions at Plant Genetic Systems (now part of Bayer CropScience) and at ISK Bioscience. Maria is now Head of Product & Business Development at AgroSavfe, mainly focusing on the implementation of the business strategy either by internal product development or through partnering with other agrochemical companies.

Miguel De Bolle was one of the very first members of the “Plant-Fungi-Interactions” group founded in the late eighties by Dr. Willem Broekaert and Dr. Bruno Cammue at the Centre of Microbial and Plant Genetics (formerly F. A. Janssens Institute for Genetics) at the K.U.Leuven. Between 1989 and 2008, Miguel was active in the group first as a predoctoral and later as a postdoctoral researcher.

The early research concentrated on antifungal peptides from seeds of different plants, but later evolved into the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana focusing, among others, on the role of plant defensins in host plant defense and on plant defense mechanisms in general. In 2008, Miguel left the academic world and joined Janssen PMP (Preservation and Material Protection, a division of Janssen Pharmaceutica, Johnson & Johnson) where he was as bioresearch manager, responsible for the biological research in numerous projects for different business units, such as Post-Harvest, Allergen Control up to Microbial Control. Miguel joined AgroSavfe as Head of Research and will be leading and coordinating the research activities for the different projects and for the Agrobody™-technology platform.

“We are extremely pleased” says Marnix Peferoen, CEO “that Maria and Miguel have joined our team. Last year, when AgroSavfe started, the focus was on establishing the labs and the research team. We are now fully operational and have made significant progress in all our projects. We recently decided to also add two researchers to the current team to further support these project activities. Miguel will be the driving force for the research and development of these projects and the Agrobody™-technology platform. In addition, we are preparing product development and potential collaborations based on the current project portfolio and continue to explore needs and opportunities in crop protection where the Agrobody™-technology platform could provide significant value. With her experience in the crop protection industry, Maria is well positioned to lead the product and business development of the Agrobody™-technology platform.”