Manfred Augstein is owner of velixX GmbH, a company founded in 2010, managing technology development projects — from a One-Step Diabetes Meter to a new research lab coagulation system (which was awarded with the Red Dot Design Award in 2013). Manfred is involved in various high-tech cluster organizations and has excellent contacts to the leading European universities of biotechnology and microsystems. He supports high-tech start-ups as well as the key players in the diagnostics business.

Manfred has an engineering background in mechanics and graduated as Dipl.-Ing. at the University of Karlsruhe (today KIT). For over 20 years he was active in the field of In-Vitro Diagnostic development at Boehringer Mannheim / Roche Diagnostics, one of the pioneers of point of care diagnostics. During his time at Roche, Manfred was responsible for some of the leading product developments in the area of Point-of-Care, set-up the first inter-divisional platform-project and was responsible for the first successful Lab-on-Disc project. Some of the PoC products that he developed are still market leaders in their area (e.g. CoaguChek XS, Cobas h232). He demonstrated that he knows what it takes to develop technology projects. He managed the product development from feasibility study to market launch, coordinated different development companies and synchronized the requirements from different stake holders.

Together with his technical partner network he nowadays consults on technological questions of health care and turns proposed solutions into reality. His focus is in miniaturazation, micro-fluidics and manufacturing of complex consumable parts, especially for Point-of-Care Diagnostics. Enhanced with the ability to design everything around the consumable, like measurement device etc.