Dirk Roymans

He has extensive knowledge of moving drugs from discovery into (early) clinical development across different disease indications, including (respiratory) antivirals, mycobacterial inhibitors, immunomodulators, anticancer drugs and drugs for animal health. Driven by his passion to bring new therapeutic solutions to patients and treat the world’s most devastating infectious diseases, he has discovered and progressed several molecules against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), influenza A&B and Mycobacterium tuberculosis towards IND stage, of which rilematovir, a RSV fusion inhibitor, has recently reached Phase III clinical development.

Dirk is the founder and managing director of DNS Life Sciences Consulting, a company providing advice and professional services to large pharma companies, biotech SMEs and start-ups as well as academic partners in life sciences, by designing drug discovery strategies, guiding early-stage business model innovation, portfolio and project management, supporting product-market-fit optimization, as well as path-to-market design. He is an author on over 30 peer-reviewed publications of which some in leading journals like Science, Cell, Nature Chem Biol, Nature Commun and Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, and an inventor on over 15 different patent families.