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Justyna Andrysiak

Leading the product and technology pipeline that produced the EU's first authorised bacteriophage-based animal feed additive

Proteon Pharmaceuticals S.A.

How Proteon Pharmaceuticals' CPTO drove 15 years of phage R&D to achieve the EU's first bacteriophage-based feed additive authorization, using non-dilutive grants to protect the long development cycle.

Justyna Andrysiak spent roughly 15 years driving Proteon Pharmaceuticals toward a single regulatory milestone: the first EU authorisation of a bacteriophage-based zootechnical feed additive. In July 2025, BAFASAL® received that authorisation. If you work in a long-cycle, regulated market, your lesson here is direct. Your regulatory approval is not a reward that arrives once the product is done. It is the product. Treat it as a product milestone from day one, and how you spend time, money, and team energy changes.

How she innovates

As Chief Product and Technology Officer at Proteon Pharmaceuticals, Andrysiak manages the full pipeline from phage characterization through clinical validation to commercial registration. The hard problem her team solved was not phage biology. It was commercialization: “What’s innovative in our approach is that today we have the tools to characterize and produce bacteriophages in a scalable, repeatable way,” she said at the Animal AgTech Innovation Summit in Amsterdam (October 2024).

How that plays out:

  • AI-driven genomic characterization in-house. Andrysiak’s team uses molecular biology and AI tools to characterize phages and design synergistic cocktail products with enhanced stability and specificity. The team relies less on external research partners for the core science as a result.
  • Non-dilutive grant funding as a financing strategy. More than EUR 7.7 million in non-dilutive R&D and commercial grants protects a pipeline that needs 15-year development cycles from investor pressure to compress timelines.
  • Cross-functional culture by design. She describes her approach as “dedicated to building a culture based on bottoms-up initiatives and collaboration across organizational boundaries” to reach “a true one team approach to innovation.” For a product that pulls in microbiology, regulatory affairs, manufacturing, and commercial teams, that culture is itself a product decision.
  • Co-invention alongside the science team. Andrysiak is named co-inventor on US patent application 20240050498, “Synergistic Composition of Phages and Its Formation Method,” filed via PCT in 2021.

What guides her

Andrysiak operates on the belief that precision tools beat broad-spectrum ones when the goal is reducing antibiotic resistance. Bacteriophages target specific bacteria. Antibiotics hit everything. She spent 15 years turning that scientific distinction into a regulatory argument, a manufacturing process, and eventually a commercial product authorised by the EU and registered in Brazil.

The innovation funnel she ran was unusually long by any standard. EFSA published a positive scientific opinion on BAFASAL® safety and efficacy in December 2024. EU authorisation followed in July 2025. Brazil’s MAPA registered BAFASAL PRO in 2024. Each of those was a ship event, not a step toward the real milestone. Treating them that way kept the team and the funding aligned over a decade and a half.

What makes her effective

By combining product development with grant acquisition, Andrysiak holds together two disciplines that rarely sit in one role. They demand different modes of attention. One is creative and experimental. The other is administrative and compliance-driven. Securing EUR 7.7 million in non-dilutive funding while running a product pipeline and building a cross-functional team across microbiology, regulatory affairs, and manufacturing takes real operational range.

If your biotech runs a long R&D cycle, the usual failure mode is not bad science. It is funding running out, or collaboration breaking down, before the product is ready to be regulated. Andrysiak appears to have solved both problems in parallel, which is what makes the BAFASAL® authorisation more than a scientific achievement.

What you can borrow

  • Reframe regulatory approval as a product milestone. If your market is regulated, the approval is not what comes after the product is ready. It is what makes the product real. Build your roadmap, culture, and funding strategy around that framing from the beginning.
  • Use non-dilutive grants to protect long development cycles. EUR 7.7 million in non-dilutive funding means 15 years of R&D without investor pressure to compress timelines. In capital-intensive, regulation-dependent work, that protection is an active strategic choice.
  • Solve the production problem alongside the science. The commercial breakthrough at Proteon was scalable, repeatable phage characterization, which turned a laboratory technique into a manufacturing process. Science that cannot be reproduced at scale is not a product.
  • Build “one team” culture explicitly. When you develop a multi-disciplinary product, your teams will not collaborate across boundaries by default. Cross-boundary work requires deliberate choices about how the teams are organized, how decisions get made, and what gets celebrated.

Incidental facts

  • Master’s degree in Biotechnology (specialisation: Technical Biochemistry). Certified project manager.
  • Chief Product and Technology Officer at Proteon Pharmaceuticals S.A. (Lodz, Poland), with the company since approximately 2009.
  • Named co-inventor on US patent application 20240050498, “Synergistic Composition of Phages and Its Formation Method,” published February 15, 2024.
  • BAFASAL® received EU authorisation as the first bacteriophage-based zootechnical feed additive for poultry, July 2025. EFSA positive scientific opinion: December 2024.
  • More than EUR 7.7 million in non-dilutive R&D and commercial grants secured across Proteon’s pipeline.

Last updated June 15, 2026 · Curated by the innovationterms editorial team