International leaders in the Pharma, MedTech, Healthcare, and Life Sciences sectors, along with key players in the innovation ecosystem and authoritative voices from various fields, will share their perspectives and visions on the major issues transforming the Life Sciences sector.
18:00 – 22:00
18:00
Registration and Networking Welcome
18:45
Opening Ceremony
Master of Ceremony:
Journalist for Sky TG24
Opening Remarks:
President of the WOMA Forum Scientific Committee President of BioPharma Network - Pharmaceutical Managers Association
CEO WOMA Forum
19:00
Institutional Opening
Councillor for the Budget, Public Property and the Extraordinary Housing Plan, Milan City Council
19:10
Panel: The value of science, of innovation, of skills and information for the system.
A session dedicated to key themes for the future of the entire Life Sciences ecosystem. Science, innovation, skills, and information as strategic and synergistic levers for the system’s development.
Vice President of Assolombarda with delegation to Europe and Life Sciences; President and CEO of MSD Italia
Chief Executive Officer of Fondazione AIRC
CEO of Il Sole 24 ORE Group
19:30
New Health Economy
A discussion on public-private partnerships, the value of health as a driver of global development, and the collective responsibility to create innovative and sustainable healthcare ecosystems.
OTSUKA , Opening Session:
Managing Director at Otsuka Pharmaceutical Italy
Speaker:
Former President of the European Commission, Former Prime Minister of Portugal
OTSUKA , Q&A and take-home messages:
People & Comms Director Iberia, People Director Italy Otsuka Pharmaceutical
20:30
Charity Dinner in aid of the AIRC Foundation for Cancer Research
WOMA actively supports scientific research by offering initial funding, dedicated visibility, and inviting participants, partners, and sponsors to contribute through voluntary donations.
A standing dinner open to all participants as a gesture of collective solidarity, where everyone can make a contribution. All funds raised will go towards supporting the careers of young researchers, transforming the forum into a collective commitment to promoting cancer research and investing in the next generation of scientific talent.
Every amount will be an important contribution for research.
9:00 – 17:00
08:00
Registration and Networking Welcome
09:00
Opening Ceremony
Master of Ceremony:
Communication & PR Fractional Manager
09:05
Institutional Remarks
AlFA President (Italian Medicines Agency)
Chair of IX Commission on Social Sustainability, Housing and the Family, Lombardy Region, and Executive Board Member of AIFA
09:20
Future of Technologies in Medicine
A focus on the convergence of medicine and digital technologies, the value of innovation centered on patient experience and the evolution of care.
DELOITTE , Opening Session / Q&A and take-home messages:
Deloitte Partner - Life Sciences Sector Leader - Advisory Italy
Speaker:
The Medical Futurist
10:20
Networking Coffee Break
11:10
The next RenAIssance: driving transformation with AI
AI as a new epochal revolution: A discussion on how to expand human potential by creating new value and the crucial role of adaptable leadership in navigating technological transformation.
VIVACTIS , Opening Session / Q&A and take-home messages
AI Solutions Officer at Vivactis Europe
Speaker:
Futurist and Former Head of GTM at Open AI
12:20
Inspiration in Science by Nobel Prize
An exploration beyond the limits of science to understand the absolute value of research and how emerging biotechnologies, starting with CRISPR, are rewriting the future of medicine and humanity.
EDISON NEXT , Opening Session:
CEO Edison Next
Speaker:
CRISPR co-inventor and Nobel Prize-winning biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley
Moderation:
Professor of History of Medicine at the Vita-Salute S. Raffaele University of Milan
13:40
Networking Lunch
15:00
Vision & Strategy: Evolution of the Ecosystem
An exploration of the forces redefining business models in the healthcare sector. Prevention, longevity, biotechnological innovation, new treatment models, investment priorities, and Agentic AI in drug research and development.
IQVIA, Opening Session:
Senior Vice President & General Manager, Italy and Greece IQVIA
Speaker
Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Rubedo Life Sciences
Sales Director for MFS International Ltd.
Global Business Lead Pharma & Life Sciences, Microsoft
Moderation:
Journalist at Il Sole 24 ORE & 24OreSalute Platform Coordinator
15:40
Leadership & People
A focus on the centrality of empathy and human leadership in an increasingly technological world, the need to generate trust and psychological safety in uncertain contexts, and the value of interpersonal skills as a true competitive advantage in the AI era to foster innovation.
MAMA HEALTH, Opening Session / Q&A and take-home messages
Cofounder & CEO of mama health
Speaker:
Social Psychologist • Author • TED Speaker
16:50
Closing
CEO WOMA Forum
17:00
Goodbye Drinks
Secure your spot at WOMA Forum 2026
and participate in two days of exclusive content
José Manuel Durão Barroso is a leading global figure.
He was President of the European Commission from 2004 to 2014 and Prime Minister of Portugal from 2002 to 2004.
In 1999, Barroso was elected president of the Portuguese Social Democratic Party and became leader of the opposition.
In 2002 he was elected Prime Minister of Portugal and in 2004 he was appointed President of the European Commission.
Barroso served two five-year terms as President, during which he played an influential role in the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, the response to the financial crisis, and the accession of new members to the European Union, as the EU grew from 15 to 28 countries between 2004 and 2014. On behalf of the EU, José Manuel Barroso received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 and delivered the acceptance speech together with the President of the European Council.
Since 2016, he has been non-executive chairman of Goldman Sachs International and an advisor to Goldman Sachs, and since 2021, José Manuel Barroso has been chairman of the board of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.
Gavi is a global public-private health partnership aimed at increasing access to immunization in low-income countries, supporting the vaccination of nearly half of the world’s children.
Barroso’s academic positions include visiting professor at Georgetown University and, most recently, visiting professor of International Economic Policy and fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton.
University.
Dr. Bertalan Mesko, PhD, known as The Medical Futurist, is the Director of The Medical Futurist Institute. He specializes in analyzing the impact of science fiction technologies on global medicine and healthcare.
A physician passionate about technology with a PhD in genomics, he is also an Amazon Top 100 author and a private professor at Semmelweis Medical School in Budapest, Hungary.
Dr. Mesko has delivered over 900 keynotes at prestigious institutions such as Harvard, Stanford, and Yale universities, as well as organizations like WHO and the world’s top 10 pharmaceutical companies. His insights into healthcare technology have made him a leading global voice in the industry.
Featured in major media outlets including CNN, National Geographic, Forbes, TIME magazine, BBC, and The New York Times, Dr. Mesko regularly shares his analyses on medicalfuturist.com.
His research focuses on the role of “artificial intelligence and digital health technologies in shaping the future of” healthcare. He is a member of the “Committee on Future Research” at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Dedicated to pioneering studies on the futures of medicine as a scientific discipline, Dr. Mesko aims to make forecasting methods widely accessible in healthcare.
He is a Certified Superforecaster for Good Judgment, Inc.
Zack Kass is a global AI advisor, researcher, keynote speaker, and former Head of Go-To-Market at OpenAI, where he led global sales, partnerships, and customer success. He now advises Fortune 1000 companies like Coca-Cola, Morgan Stanley, and Amgen on AI adoption, helping leaders turn innovation into strategy. His mission is to make AI understandable and actionable, ensuring businesses, governments, and individuals shape its future responsibly. Featured in major outlets such as Fortune and Business Insider, he also supports education and research at the University of Virginia. A UC Berkeley graduate, Zack is recognized as a leading voice in applied AI and is based in Santa Barbara, California.
Jennifer Doudna, PhD, is a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. Her groundbreaking development of CRISPR-Cas9 — a genome engineering technology that allows researchers to edit DNA — with collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier earned the pair the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and forever changed the course of human and agricultural genomic research. She is also the founder of the Innovative Genomics Institute, the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair in Biomedical and Health Sciences, and a member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Gladstone Institutes, National Academy of Sciences, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a leader in the global public debate on the responsible use of CRISPR and has co-founded and serves on the advisory board of several companies using the technology in unique ways. Doudna is co-author of “A Crack in Creation”, a personal account of her research and the social and ethical implications of gene editing. To learn more, visit innovativegenomics.org/jennifer-doudna
Dr. Marco Quarta is a scientist, entrepreneur, and leading biotechnology executive specializing in the biology of aging and regenerative medicine. He is the founding CEO and current Chief Scientific Officer of Rubedo Life Sciences, a pioneering company in the field of therapies for age-related diseases. Previously, he directed translational research programs at Stanford University School of Medicine and the VA Palo Alto Hospital. A member of the Board of Directors of the European Biotechnology Federation and author of “Sfidare il Tempo,” he has co-founded several biotechnology companies and holds over 60 scientific publications and patents.
Antonio Gatti leads Global Pharma & Life Sciences at Microsoft and serves as Worldwide GTM Lead for Microsoft Discovery, the enterprise agentic platform for accelerating scientific discovery, which he helped incubate from within. His work focuses on how agentic AI is reshaping the R&D and drug discovery process across the world’s largest pharma and biotech organizations: from scientific knowledge reasoning and hypothesis generation through candidate screening, simulation, and analysis and on the enterprise patterns that make these capabilities trustworthy and deployable in regulated environments.
He brings nearly two decades bridging technology and business transformation: a decade at Accenture’s Technology Strategy practice advising C-suites, followed by a decade at Microsoft, where
he founded the digital advisory practice. He is also co-founder and faculty lead of the AI-Driven Business Models Executive Master at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano. He holds an Executive MBA from the POLIMI Graduate School of Management, and executive education from INSEAD.
Amy Cuddy is a social psychologist and New York Times bestselling author who has taught at Harvard Business School and Kellogg School of Management, and has been awarded Harvard’s Excellence in Teaching Award. She earned her Ph.D. from Princeton University and is an expert in the behavioral science of personal power, nonverbal behavior, trust-based leadership, and effective management of people and biases in high-pressure environments. Her book Presence has been translated into 35 languages and has sold over 600,000 copies, while her TED Talk, one of the most viewed in the world with over 74 million views, has influenced an entire generation on the topics of self-confidence and nonverbal communication. Her new book, Bullied (HarperCollins, 2026), redefines bullying among adults as an urgent crisis with devastating personal, organizational, and social costs, and provides readers with the tools to recognize, name, and stop it. Named by Thinkers50 as one of the 50 most influential management thinkers in the world and recognized as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, Dr. Cuddy is internationally known for her research and public engagement on leadership, empowerment, and organizational well-being. Her ideas have appeared in major media including BBC, TIME, Harvard Business Review, The Guardian and The New York Times. Her work inspires companies, leaders, and teams to cultivate more mindful, inclusive, empowering, and successful environments.
José Manuel Durão Barroso is a leading global figure.
He was President of the European Commission from 2004 to 2014 and Prime Minister of Portugal from 2002 to 2004.
In 1999, Barroso was elected president of the Portuguese Social Democratic Party and became leader of the opposition.
In 2002 he was elected Prime Minister of Portugal and in 2004 he was appointed President of the European Commission.
Barroso served two five-year terms as President, during which he played an influential role in the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, the response to the financial crisis, and the accession of new members to the European Union, as the EU grew from 15 to 28 countries between 2004 and 2014. On behalf of the EU, José Manuel Barroso received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 and delivered the acceptance speech together with the President of the European Council.
Since 2016, he has been non-executive chairman of Goldman Sachs International and an advisor to Goldman Sachs, and since 2021, José Manuel Barroso has been chairman of the board of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.
Gavi is a global public-private health partnership aimed at increasing access to immunization in low-income countries, supporting the vaccination of nearly half of the world’s children.
Barroso’s academic positions include visiting professor at Georgetown University and, most recently, visiting professor of International Economic Policy and fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton.
University.
Dr. Bertalan Mesko, PhD, known as The Medical Futurist, is the Director of The Medical Futurist Institute. He specializes in analyzing the impact of science fiction technologies on global medicine and healthcare.
A physician passionate about technology with a PhD in genomics, he is also an Amazon Top 100 author and a private professor at Semmelweis Medical School in Budapest, Hungary.
Dr. Mesko has delivered over 900 keynotes at prestigious institutions such as Harvard, Stanford, and Yale universities, as well as organizations like WHO and the world’s top 10 pharmaceutical companies. His insights into healthcare technology have made him a leading global voice in the industry.
Featured in major media outlets including CNN, National Geographic, Forbes, TIME magazine, BBC, and The New York Times, Dr. Mesko regularly shares his analyses on medicalfuturist.com.
His research focuses on the role of “artificial intelligence and digital health technologies in shaping the future of” healthcare. He is a member of the “Committee on Future Research” at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Dedicated to pioneering studies on the futures of medicine as a scientific discipline, Dr. Mesko aims to make forecasting methods widely accessible in healthcare.
He is a Certified Superforecaster for Good Judgment, Inc.
Zack Kass is a global AI advisor, researcher, keynote speaker, and former Head of Go-To-Market at OpenAI, where he led global sales, partnerships, and customer success. He now advises Fortune 1000 companies like Coca-Cola, Morgan Stanley, and Amgen on AI adoption, helping leaders turn innovation into strategy. His mission is to make AI understandable and actionable, ensuring businesses, governments, and individuals shape its future responsibly. Featured in major outlets such as Fortune and Business Insider, he also supports education and research at the University of Virginia. A UC Berkeley graduate, Zack is recognized as a leading voice in applied AI and is based in Santa Barbara, California.
Jennifer Doudna, PhD, is a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. Her groundbreaking development of CRISPR-Cas9 — a genome engineering technology that allows researchers to edit DNA — with collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier earned the pair the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and forever changed the course of human and agricultural genomic research. She is also the founder of the Innovative Genomics Institute, the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair in Biomedical and Health Sciences, and a member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Gladstone Institutes, National Academy of Sciences, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a leader in the global public debate on the responsible use of CRISPR and has co-founded and serves on the advisory board of several companies using the technology in unique ways. Doudna is co-author of “A Crack in Creation”, a personal account of her research and the social and ethical implications of gene editing. To learn more, visit innovativegenomics.org/jennifer-doudna
Amy Cuddy is a social psychologist and New York Times bestselling author who has taught at Harvard Business School and Kellogg School of Management, and has been awarded Harvard’s Excellence in Teaching Award. She earned her Ph.D. from Princeton University and is an expert in the behavioral science of personal power, nonverbal behavior, trust-based leadership, and effective management of people and biases in high-pressure environments. Her book Presence has been translated into 35 languages and has sold over 600,000 copies, while her TED Talk, one of the most viewed in the world with over 74 million views, has influenced an entire generation on the topics of self-confidence and nonverbal communication. Her new book, Bullied (HarperCollins, 2026), redefines bullying among adults as an urgent crisis with devastating personal, organizational, and social costs, and provides readers with the tools to recognize, name, and stop it. Named by Thinkers50 as one of the 50 most influential management thinkers in the world and recognized as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, Dr. Cuddy is internationally known for her research and public engagement on leadership, empowerment, and organizational well-being. Her ideas have appeared in major media including BBC, TIME, Harvard Business Review, The Guardian and The New York Times. Her work inspires companies, leaders, and teams to cultivate more mindful, inclusive, empowering, and successful environments.
