Belgium
President, Praesens Foundation
Dr. Rudi Pauwels is a pharmaceutical scientist and serial entrepreneur, passionate to make personalized medicine an everyday reality, on a global scale.
Rudi Pauwels belonged to the first group of HIV/AIDS researchers who started the efforts to find new treatments for HIV/AIDS. With the launch of his company Tibotec-Virco, Rudi Pauwels was at the foundation of a few of the world’s most used and most successful anti-HIV drugs.
He (co)-founded several successful biotech companies including Tibotec (Antiviral Drug R&D); Virco (HIV pharmacogenomics, both acquired by Johnson & Johnson (JnJ) in 2002 for 360 million USD; Galapagos Genomics (drug target discovery), MDxHealth (early biomarkers of cancer) and Biocartis, where he was Founder and CEO.
Mid 2017, he decided to hand over the role of Biocartis CEO in order to focus more on his interests in infectious diseases and technology innovation. He transitioned towards the social impact investment world by founding the Praesens Foundation that aims to develop, provide and implement easy to train and use solutions that contribute to better epidemic preparedness, early warning and rapid response for existing and emerging infectious diseases and medicine in general.