Rudi Pauwels

Rudi Pauwels (born 1960) is a Belgian pharmacologist and biotech entrepreneur.

He was one of the first researchers in the field of HIV, and he played a key role in the fight against the AIDS pandemic by discovering several widely used anti-HIV drugs during his doctorate studies at the Rega Institute (Leuven, Belgium) and while leading biotech companies Tibotec and Virco.

He studied pharmaceutical sciences at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium, and graduated as a pharmacist in 1983.

Within a year after the 1983 discovery of HIV, the viral pathogen that causes AIDS, Pauwels began work on the topic while still a doctorate student.

In 1984, in the laboratory of Professor Erik De Clercq at the Rega Institute (University of Leuven, Belgium), he started to develop the first laboratory models in search of new anti-HIV compounds.

The methods he published were widely used by fellow scientists that joined the search for new anti-AIDS (HIV) treatments.

In 1987, Pauwels obtained a research fellowship of the Janssen Research Foundation, which started a long-standing collaboration and close friendship with the late Dr. Paul Janssen, founder of Janssen Pharmaceuticals.

Janssen became a mentor and would influence his pharmaceutical work.

In 1990, the Janssen-funded collaboration of his small team at the Rega Institute would lead to the discovery of the first non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NNRTI).

It was also Janssen who would introduce him to Dr. Paul Stoffels, with whom he would collaborate at Tibotec, Virco and Johnson & Johnson.

Pauwels obtained his Ph.D. in pharmaceutical sciences from the KU Leuven in 1990 with greatest distinction (maxima cum laude), with De Clercq and Janssen as his promotors.

His thesis was entitled "Development of new agents against the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)".

A few years after obtaining his Ph.D. and leading a small group of researchers at the Rega Institute, Pauwels began to work on the problem of HIV drug resistance.

Since 1994 he has either founded or co-founded several biotech companies, specialising in personalized and high precision medicine.

His current roles include founder and president of the Praesens Foundation, chairman of Praesens Care, executive chairman of IMEC/Johns Hopkins spin-off company miDiagnostics and board positions in various companies and research institutes.

He is an author of more than 150 peer-reviewed papers and recipient of numerous awards and distinctions.

In 1994, he founded the anti-HIV drug discovery company Tibotec together with his wife, pharmacist Carine Claeys.

A year later they founded, together with Paul Stoffels, the diagnostics company Virco, which would develop HIV-treatment diagnostic services that would help physicians select the optimal therapy for their patients (e.g. Antivirogram).

In 1999, Pauwels was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Tibotec spin-out, Galapagos Genomics, that would combine functional genomic technologies from Tibotec and Crucell, a Dutch-based biotech company.

In early 2000, it became clear to Pauwels that the future of medicine was increasingly depending on our molecular insights of disease.

New generations of drugs would target the underlying molecular dysfunctional processes.

It meant that measuring relevant biomarkers would become even more essential.

But experiences from the global AIDS crisis and Virco in particular, taught him that the operational model of sending samples from patients to central laboratories was time-consuming and wasteful.

It appeared that his approach did not scale easily around the world.

Ideally, the lab functionality needed to come (in miniaturized format) to patients and their direct environment, not the other way around.

During his Ph.D. studies, he broadened his interests beyond virology into software programming and robotics.

Tibotec-Virco was acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2002, after which Pauwels became vice president of Johnson & Johnson's global anti-infectives drug discovery group, focusing on Hepatitis C and respiratory diseases.

Here, he worked on drugs and diagnostics for respiratory diseases.

In the middle of the SARS crisis in 2003, he started a project to develop an anti-SARS drug discovery system that, in 2020, was used as the basis for efforts to find inhibitors for SARS-CoV-2.

This effort, involving a number of pharmaceutical companies, occurred at the Rega Institute, continuing the work based on his original large-scale anti-HIV drug screening and recently received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The work of Pauwels and his colleagues resulted in several drugs that were successfully introduced for modern antiviral AIDS therapies.

They include next-generation anti-HIV compounds by Tibotec/Johnson & Johnson, Prezista, Intelence and Edurant, as well as the direct precursor to Gilead Sciences' Viread.

These drugs, together with the diagnostic technologies by Virco, have helped to turn AIDS into the chronic, manageable disease it is today, for those who have access to the medicines.

The drugs have also generated several billion dollar revenues yearly, providing returns for investors and shareholders and helping to finance the R&D for the treatment of important diseases.

Realizing the need for better, scalable diagnostics at the point of need, he decided in 2004 to go on a three-year sabbatical at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology-EPFL in Lausanne (Switzerland), one of the leading research centres in micro- and nano-technology.

In 2007, he created Biocartis, a molecular diagnostics company that would develop and commercialize the Idylla platform, a fully integrated and automated sample-to-molecular diagnostic (PCR) result solution.

The company grew rapidly and was taken public.

The company offered precision diagnostics for cancer therapies, but there was ultimately no broader support for his expansion plans into infectious diseases.

After leading the company for a decade, he decided in 2017 to further pursue his interests in infectious diseases.

In 2020 he was appointed as co-chair of the Diagnostics R&D Working Group of the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator.