Rudi Pauwels

A few years after obtaining his Ph.D. and leading a small group of researchers at the Rega Institute, Dr. Pauwels took the decision to tackle the problem of HIV drug resistance and take his antiviral discovery efforts to the next level. 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 Dr. Paul Stoffels, the diagnostics company Virco, that would develop revolutionary HIV-treatment diagnostic services that would help physicians select the optimal therapy for their patients (e.g. Antivirogram™).[9]

Tibotec-Virco was acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2002, after which Dr. Pauwels became Vice-President of Johnson & Johnson’s global anti-infectives drug discovery group during a few years, focusing on HCV and respiratory diseases. Here, he was confronted with the challenge to develop a strategy that integrated 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 17 years later is used as the basis for ongoing efforts to find inhibitors for SARS-Cov-2.[10] This international effort, involving a number of pharmaceutical companies, occurs at the same Rega Institute that continued the work based on his original legacy of large-scale anti-HIV drug screening and recently received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The work of Rudi Pauwels and his colleagues resulted in several drugs that were successfully introduced into the clinic and constitute cornerstones 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 been pivotal 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.[9]

In 1999 Rudi Pauwels was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Tibotec spin-out Galapagos Genomics (Euronext GLPG), that would combine functional genomic technologies from Tibotec and Crucell, a Dutch-based biotech company. Galapagos Genomics has now become one of Europe’s leading new pharmaceutical companies with an advanced pipeline of new drugs.[11]

In early 2000, it became clear to Dr. 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 of such diseases. It meant that measuring relevant biomarkers in samples of patients 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 did not come without cost and logistical hurdles. 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.

Already during his Ph.D. studies, he broadened his interests beyond virology into software programming and robotics. Realizing the need for better, scalable diagnostics at the point of needs, he decided in 2004 to go on a 3-years sabbatical at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology-EPFL in Lausanne (Switzerland), one of the leading research centers 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 (Euronext BCART). The company had a very attractive offering in 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.

During the Ebola outbreak in 2014-2015, and after spending the better part of his life in laboratories, Dr. Rudi Pauwels wanted to observe first-hand how the world was dealing with outbreaks of that scale in the 21st century. He witnessed the best of humanity, but also the gaps and needs for rapid, accurate and easy-to-use diagnostics close to the affected communities.

Inspired by this experience in West Africa, in 2016 he created the Praesens Fund under the Belgian King Baudouin Foundation. The name is related to the Latin word praesens, meaning ‘being here now, making an impact’. With the help of a series of early believers – among which passionate collaborators, sponsors and technology providers – the initial sketch of a first-generation Mobile Lab was soon made a reality.

As the project entered the next stage in 2017, Dr. Rudi Pauwels created the Praesens Foundation, co-directed by Prof. Peter Piot. It is developing, providing and implementing solutions that contribute to better epidemic preparedness, early warning and rapid response for existing and emerging infectious disease threats. In 2017-2018, an initial pilot study led by the Praesens Foundation deployed the first all-terrain Mobile Biosafety Laboratory for infectious disease testing across Senegal. It offers rapid deployment, connectivity and state-of-the-art technology for effective field diagnostics, reducing turn-around time and improving case management. This innovative and scalable solution has great potential to improve epidemic preparedness and contribute to disease intelligence, striving towards a more proactive and holistic approach to healthcare.[12]

The latest initiative of Praesens is Praesens Care, that builds on the continuity of the Praesens Foundation’s innovation. Through this venture it intends to pivot the model to scale up - expanding geographically and functionally - and to ensure long-term sustainability of the value proposition. Driven by the mission to provide the best healthcare services, anywhere, anytime to anyone in the world, Praesens Care is an impact enterprise that offers Lab As A Service (LAAS). Praesens Care offers a fleet of mobile biosafety laboratories (Mobile Labs) in a regional hub approach to countries and partners in need to reinforce their healthcare delivery system, with integrated routine diagnostic services (multi-disease testing and real-time reporting), primary healthcare and community engagement. It offers an outreach capacity to provide medical (e.g. diagnostics, therapies, vaccination) and non-medical (health promotion, social mobilization) services at the peripheral level of the health system, as close as possible to the communities.[13]

In 2018 Dr. Pauwels was appointed Executive Chairman of miDiagnostics, a large life science spin-off company of imec and John Hopkins University. Imec is the world’s leading nano-electronics R&D hub with more than 4,000 engineers and scientists headquartered in Leuven, Belgium. Based on nearly a decade of imec research on nano-fluidics and silicon-based nanostructures, miDiagnostics is developing a next generation diagnostic platform with broad in vitro diagnostics (IVD) applications, particular in the point of care area. It is developing a series of new nanofluidic silicon processors that are embedded in test cards – about the size of a credit card – and that are inserted in a compact reader.[14]

In 2007 Rudi Pauwels joined Advent Partners, a venture capital firm in London. He assisted Advent in reviewing investment opportunities and supported several portfolio companies.[15] He was closely involved in the formation of Respivert Ltd., where he acted as Chairman of the board. Respivert was a molecule drug discovery company working towards the identification of new treatments for patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). Respivert was acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2010.[16]

In 2017 he became member of the Investment Committee of Smile Investments, a €350M European growth equity fund.[17]

• 2020–present: Co-Chair of the Diagnostics pillar of the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT)-Accelerator together with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.[5][6]
• 2008-2018: Dr. Pauwels was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of imec in Leuven, Belgium.
• 2015-2019: member of the Advisory Board of A*STAR’s Accelerate, a division of the Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research.
• 2014-2015: Board Member of MDx Health.
• 2014-2015: Board Member of MyCartis NV, a spin-out of Biocartis with offices at the EPFL Science Park in Lausanne, Switzerland and the Biotech Industry Park in Ghent, Belgium.
• 2011-2012: Board Member of Flanders Bio, Belgium.
• 2009-2013: Member of the Advisory Board of A*STAR Explorative Therapeutics Centre (ETC), Singapore.
• 1995-2003: Lecturer at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium. Academic appointment – course on Virology/Antiviral drug discovery and development in a post-graduate program on Medical and Pharmaceutical Research.
• 1999-2002: Member of the Board of Directors of the Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (V.I.B.), Ghent, Belgium. V.I.B. is a research institute with 1,000 employees that conducts strategic basic research in the various life science domains.
• 1985: Research Project at Smith-Kline RIT (now GSK), Genval, Belgium. Development of a bioassay for Pertussis Toxin using Chinese Hamster Ovary cells, with Dr. J. Pêtre as promoter.