Weronika Slesak

Weronika Slesak
Occupation	Biologist, entrepreneur
Known for	Co-founder and CSO of Evolvere BioSciences

Weronika Slesak (also rendered Weronika Ślesak in Polish-language sources) is a biologist and entrepreneur based in Oxford, United Kingdom. She is the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) of Evolvere BioSciences, a biotechnology company developing next-generation antibiotics designed to outpace bacterial evolution. The company was part of Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch.

Career

Slesak studied at the University of Oxford, where she and her co-founders met as biochemists and evolutionary biologists. Her scientific work has included research on integrons—genetic mechanisms that enable bacteria to rapidly adapt and acquire new genes, including those conferring antibiotic resistance. She is a co-author of research published in Science Advances on cassette recombination dynamics within chromosomal integrons.

Evolvere BioSciences was first established as part of the Oxford biotech ecosystem. The company became associated with the BioEscalator, the University of Oxford's biotech incubator, in the summer of 2021, and won the Oxford University Biotech Society's competition. Evolvere subsequently received support from the Oxford Seed Fund, an investment programme affiliated with the Saïd Business School that typically invests up to £50,000 in Oxford-affiliated startups.

The company's core technology uses computational models that leverage co-evolutionary protein–protein interaction datasets combined with artificial intelligence to forecast bacterial mutations. The aim is to create antibiotics that can precisely target pathogenic bacteria without harming beneficial microbes or human cells. Evolvere describes its approach as producing "future-proof" antibiotics that address resistance before it develops, potentially extending the effective lifespan of new antibiotic treatments. The company operates at the intersection of AI-powered drug discovery, biotech, and therapeutics.

In April 2023, Slesak co-authored a technical article with colleagues from Evolvere BioSciences describing how the company performs macromolecule design using Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure. In May 2023, she and co-founder Piotr Jędryszek were featured by the Polish edition of Forbes as part of its "25 before 25" list, which highlighted their work on a platform for creating next-generation antibiotics.

Slesak has been described on Crunchbase as "an Oxford biologist leveraging evolution as an engineering tool."