How did you first find your way into the pharmaceutical industry?
I consider myself primarily a physician, but my objective has always been to try and touch the lives of patients. I’d practiced for many, many years as a rheumatologist and after my PhD I became a Professor of Medicine in Amsterdam at the Academic Medical Centre of the University of Amsterdam, and during this period I realised that if you want to make a medicine you need another entity to make this possible. During that time I also worked with many biotech firms and pharmaceutical companies as a consultant. Ultimately, I decided to join GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) with the idea that if I could make a medicine there, it could potentially affect the lives of billions of patients, rather than maybe hundreds or thousands that you can do as an academic professor.
