Axithra today announced the appointment of Lars Kongsbak as Chief Executive Officer. With over 25 years of industry leadership, Kongsbak will lead the company through a critical transition toward clinical validation and its upcoming Series A financing.
Axithra was founded to address a major unmet need in TDM: the lack of rapid, actionable, and patient-specific drug measurements at the point of need. The company has successfully demonstrated a prototype that uses Raman spectroscopy for TDM with clinical samples. With initial products now approaching clinical testing in hospital settings, Axithra is entering a critical transition from technology development to clinical validation.
“I am truly excited to join Axithra at this pivotal moment,” said Lars Kongsbak, CEO of Axithra. “The team has built a unique platform with the potential to transform therapeutic drug monitoring. I look forward to working with this exceptional team of talented people to bring clinically impactful products to an underserved market and ultimately improve patient outcomes.”
TDM is a well-established clinical practice used to optimise dosing by measuring drug concentrations in patients’ blood. However, traditional TDM relies on centralised laboratory techniques such as immunoassays or LC-MS, which are slow or resource-intensive. Results often take hours or days, restricting clinical action, and typically measure only total drug concentration, rather than the pharmacologically active fraction.
Axithra’s Raman spectroscopy-based platform addresses these limitations by enabling rapid, scalable, and label-free measurement of drug concentrations, with the potential to support both total and free drug monitoring. This paves the way for highly precise, personalised dosing for a wide range of therapies, including antibiotics, oncology drugs, antipsychotics, and other small-molecule drugs, using a new, groundbreaking platform for drug monitoring and precision medicine.
“It is a pleasure to welcome Lars as CEO of Axithra,” said Alain Pluquet, Chairman of Axithra and former Executive VP, Chief Technology Officer of bioMérieux. “This is a key phase for the company, which is moving from successful product development to clinical validation and preparing for its next fundraising round. We needed someone with solid experience to strengthen the team and guide Axithra towards its goal: to offer an innovative platform with strong medical and economic value. Lars brings exactly that.”
Co-founder and former CEO Leander Van Neste will assume the role of COO, spearheading clinical validation and building the operational and manufacturing foundation required for commercial scale-up.
Axithra is now actively preparing for a Series A capital raise to support clinical validation, regulatory progress, and early market introduction in the U.S. and Europe.
About Axithra
Axithra is a spin-off from Ghent University and imec, developing a platform to quickly and accurately measure and monitor drug concentrations in blood, paving the way for treatments tailored to the specific needs of each individual, at any given time. The first application is focusing on personalising β-lactam antibiotic treatments in the intensive care unit. The Company’s platform is based on proprietary optical and photonics technology and will allow physicians to optimise patient care by enabling personalised treatments. For more information, visit www.axithra.com or email info@axithra.com.
