Koite Health is an award-winning team of doctors and engineers, based in Helsinki, Finland.
Our mission is to develop treatments that have a long-lasting positive impact on the well-being and health of our customers and can dramatically reduce national healthcare expenses. Koite believes in the core values of Innovation, Camaraderie, Hard Work and Honesty.
Chairman of the Board
Seppo Mäkinen (born 1952 in Sweden, educated in Finland, MSc in Physical Chemistry 1979) began his career running an analytical laboratory and became an expert in chromatography before moving into Sales & Marketing, building the Waters liquid chromatography business in the Nordics. In 1987, he entered the investment sector, first as Director of Sitra’s biosciences fund, then as co-founder of BioFund, which he sold in 2008 to Capinordic. Since then, he has been a serial entrepreneur and early-stage investor in medtech, diagnostics, and digital health, also serving as partner with Merieux Développement (France) and Pathena (Portugal).
He has been a board member/owner in around 50 international companies, including Pharming Healthcare, Exiqon, Ginolis, Kone Instruments, Wallac, and Merlin Diagnostica, as well as listed companies such as Bittium Oyj, Optomed Oyj, and ValiRx plc. Since 2018, he has achieved about one successful exit per year. His current expertise lies in telemedicine, digital health/AI, and integrating diagnostics with therapeutics.
CMO, Co-Founder, Board member
Tommi is a cardiac surgeon specialised in repairing the most difficult birth-defect malformed hearts and performing kidney, liver and heart transplantations in children. He has an outstanding scientific career. He was leading the first-in-man cardiac surgical autologous stem cell transplantation for heart failure. He was awarded for the best medical PhD thesis supervision in Finland in 2016. The same year, he launched new decellularised pulmonary heart valves for clinical use in Helsinki as an on-shelf product, first in the Western world. He has firsthand knowledge of the systemic effects of mouth diseases, which was the early motivator for the development of Koite Dual-Light PDT, originally initiated in the iDenta project at Aalto University.
Founding Partner
Juha is an engineering entrepreneur and executive with 20+ years in photonics and semiconductors. He is a world leading industrial expert in the segment of siloxane semiconductor materials and his technology has resulted in several multi-million € businesses while used in billions of phones, displays and sensor devices. During his entrepreneurship, Juha has started several companies and executed multiple successful exits with triple digit ROI multiple. Before his entrepreneurship he was one of the youngest PhDs in chemistry in Finland at the age of 24. He is also an adjunct professor in materials chemistry. He has published more than 70 scientific and technical articles, authored 3 technical editorials and contributed as an inventor of about 100 patents.
Senior Advisor, Board Member
Timo is a medical technology executive with experience ranging from the pharma industry to manufacturing and selling medical devices. Timo has an immense value growth track record in his 21 years as a VP/GM in Thermo Fisher Scientific and later in Revenio Group Oyj. Under Timo’s guidance, the Revenio Group stock value grew over 2800% from 0.1€/share to 28€/share. In Timo, world-class medical industry know-how and connections combine into in-depth substance knowledge from the dental field as Timo also has a bachelor’s degree in dentistry in addition to a Masters degree in business.
Dr. Meurman (M.D., Ph.D., D. Odont., Dr. hc. (multi), FDSRCS(Ed), ML) is professor emeritus of oral infectious diseases at the University of Helsinki and head physician at the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Diseases, Helsinki University Hospital, Finland. He is the author or co-author of hundreds of peer-reviewed original research publications (PubMed 325; Web of Science 368; H-index 48), several textbooks and textbook chapters, mainly focusing on the various aspects of oral health and systemic health and in oral microbiology. Dr. Meurman has also had special interests in probiotics, a new research area he pioneered in the early 1990s, and in Candida infections. Dr. Meurman is past-President of the IADR (International Association for Dental Research).
Dr. Timo Sorsa, is Professor of Periodontology at Helsinki University and Karolinska University. Timo is one of the most respected periodontal researchers in the world. He has been developing and patenting many solutions in the treatment of periodontitis, including the most validated clinical test for active periodontitis identification. Matrix metalloproteinase-8 immunological test is the most respected and vigorously tested diagnostic method in the market. Timo Sorsa has also been in the early phase of innovating the low-dose doxycyclin, which is one of the few solutions to treat chronic activated periodontitis in the currently available. Timo has 700 peer reviewed publications, with over 30 000 citations, and the h-index of 89.
Heikki is the leading Paediatric Dentist working as the Head of the Department of Dentistry in the New Children’s Hospital, Helsinki. Heikki has extensive experience in solving the oral problems of the medically compromised children. He has special interest to the prophylaxis and treatment of Early Childhood Caries. He is also experienced in the light-based treatments of paediatric cancer patients who suffer from oral mucositis. Heikki is working as the Chief Dentist in Paediatric dentistry at the New Children’s Hospital, where he is leading a team of dentists, responsible of treating paediatric patients under anaesthesia. The number of the children treated under anaesthesia is arising in Heikki’s leadership and is currently 1250 cases per year.