The Abselion team
Leadership team
Ruizhi Wang
Founder & CEO
Ruizhi is the founder and CEO of Abselion. He directs all aspects of company strategy, planning, and operations.
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Ruizhi has received a number of awards, both for his personal work and for his involvement at Abselion. These include the Emerging Technologies Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Displaying Future Award of Merck Group and the Grand Price of the Cambridge University Entrepreneurs. He is also an Enterprise Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a recipient of the Scholarship of the German Academic Merit Foundation.
Ruizhi received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, and MSc./BSc. from ETH Zurich. He has co-authored 20 publications, with a total more than 700 citations.
Paolo Romele
VP of Science
Paolo is the VP of Science of Abselion. He is responsible for leading the research & development team in sensing, consumables, applications and assay development.
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Prior to his current role, he worked at STMicroelectronics on the R&D of semiconductor devices. Paolo is a highly accomplished scientists in the area of non-optical biosensing. During his PhD, he conducted pioneering work on the principles of electrochemical detection of ions and proteins. This led to two first-author publications in Nature Communications, and multiple others in high impact journals.
Paolo received his PhD from the University of Brescia.
Kim Orton-Smith
VP of Sales & Marketing
Kim is VP of Sales and Marketing and is responsible for developing and delivering the go-to-market strategy for Amperia. Kim has 19 years of global commercial experience in life sciences, with a track record of turning product innovation into scalable revenues and driving sustainable commercial strategies.
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Prior to joining Abselion, Kim held leadership roles at Abcam, where she played a pivotal role in business growth, product innovation, and customer acquisition. As Vice President of Product (Research Area Strategy), she led a strategic transformation that expanded market reach, accelerated product adoption, and drove year-on-year revenue growth in a competitive landscape. She has successfully developed high-performing, international teams by fostering customer-centric strategies and a results-driven culture.
Kim has extensive experience in go-to-market strategies, business development, and strategic partnerships. She has collaborated with industry leaders to develop and validate unique antibody-based assay platforms, demonstr
Jean-Paul Delport
Head of Engineering
Jean-Paul is responsible for transforming proof of principle prototypes into products and producing customer ready instruments and consumables.
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Board of Directors
Simon Douglas
Chairman of the Board
Simon is the Chairman of the Board of Abselion. He leads all board meetings and supports the management team through his wealth of experience.
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Simon has over 30 years’ experience in the biotech industry, including 10 years working for Amersham International (now GE), ICI and Zeneca (now Astra Zeneca), in a variety of commercial and technical positions, and over five years with Tepnel Life Sciences plc (now Hologic Inc), a London Stock Exchange listed diagnostic company where he was Chief Executive.
He has been the CEO/Executive Chairman of three other venture capital backed Life Science companies and headed up the trade sale of two of these and AIM listing of one. He is currently Chairman of two AIM listed companies, Fusion Antibodies plc, a CRO providing services for the discovery and development of antibody-based therapeutics and Omega Diagnostics Group plc, focussed on a personalised and functional approach to health and nutrition. He is also an advisor for Sensam Ltd, who are developing cancer screening tests based on the detection of volatile organic compounds.
Ruizhi Wang
Founder & CEO
Ruizhi is the founder and CEO of Abselion. He directs all aspects of company strategy, planning, and operations.
Read more
Ruizhi has received a number of awards, both for his personal work and for his involvement at Abselion. These include the Emerging Technologies Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Displaying Future Award of Merck Group and the Grand Price of the Cambridge University Entrepreneurs. He is also an Enterprise Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a recipient of the Scholarship of the German Academic Merit Foundation.
Ruizhi received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, and MSc./BSc. from ETH Zurich. He has co-authored 20 publications, with a total more than 700 citations.
Anne Jones
Non-Executive Director
Anne is currently the President and CEO of G-CON Manufacturing, Inc. and brings years of global experience in Life Sciences, Healthcare, and Cell Therapy.
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Anne is an innovator in cleanrooms for biopharmaceutical processing and other advanced technologies, having previously held the positions of CBO at Celularity Inc., a next-gen cellular medicines company, and COO at Genuity Science, where world leading genomics and machine learning was applied to map the causal biology of disease.
Prior to this Anne served in VP/ General Manager roles driving significant business growth at Danaher Corporation, Agilent Technologies and GE Healthcare.
As well as her wealth of commercial experience, Anne has a PhD in Cancer Research with a focus on protein and molecular biology.
Oliver Hardick
Board Director
Ollie is an Entrepreneur in Residence in the Biotechnology team at M Ventures, with a focus on Life Science Tools & Technology innovation.
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Ollie is a successful entrepreneur with core expertise in the bioprocessing field, and interest more broadly in life sciences & manufacturing technologies.
Completing his Engineering Doctorate at UCL 2012, he moved into the entrepreneurial world founding Puridify, a biotech tools company, which he led as CEO through VC funding to a strong exit by GE Healthcare in 2017, interacting with biotherapeutic manufacturers globally throughout this journey.
Having spent 5 years leading an SME followed by 5 years in a large corporate he understands the needs of both and can provide key insights to spin-outs & start-ups from inception to exit.
Luke Rajah
Board Director
Luke is an investment manager representing the BGF early-stage team, with a focus on and life sciences and deep tech.
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Prior to BGF, Luke headed up strategy and operations at Wren Therapeutics, a drug discovery company focused on neurodegenerative diseases. Before that, he was an early-stage investor at Ombu Group, where he also focused on life sciences and deep tech. He started his career at the Boston Consulting Group, working on strategy with senior management and boards across the energy and life sciences sectors.
Luke also holds a PhD in Biophysics from the University of Cambridge, where he led a range of projects focused on microfluidics technology and the biophysics of protein misfolding diseases.
Chris Major
Board Director
Chris is a serial entrepreneur and Founding Partner of BioProcess360. He has more than 20 years Bioprocessing experience, in both upstream and downstream technologies.
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His first start up was WAVE Bioreactors where he helped drive the adoption of single-use technology. WAVE was acquired by GE Healthcare (now Cytiva) in 2007. He has also spent time driving global commercial activities with key accounts at GE Healthcare and Merck Millipore. He started his career as a bench scientist, holds an MSc. in Biotechnology and attended Harvard Business School.