Meet our Experts

Lieven Annemans is a Senior Full Professor of Health Economics at the medical faculty of Ghent University in Belgium. He is Past-President of ISPOR, the International Society for PharmacoEconomics and Outcomes Research, and was advisor to the Belgian Minister of Health. He has experience in health economic evaluations and health technology assessments (HTA) of medicines, medical devices and preventive health actions in various medical areas, and conducted >300 studies in over 20 countries. He is currently also active as an independent consultant in health economics and prior to his professorship he has also worked in the pharma industry.

His main interests are epidemiological models, early-stage HTA, retrospective/ prospective health economic evaluations, and physician payment systems. He has published over 250 papers in peer-reviewed journals, and provides lectures and trainings on health economic evaluations and HTA. He is the author of the book Health economics for non-economists: an introduction to the principles, methods and pitfalls of health economic evaluations (Academia Press; 2008).

Prof. Dr. Annemans joined C.E.L.forpharma’s faculty in 2009. Since then he delivers the immensely popular course Health Economics for Non-Health-Economists and since 2014 also The HTA Course.

As the founder and Managing Director of Inpharmation, a consultancy specialising in evidence-based prediction of sales demand and price elasticity for pharmaceuticals, Gary Johnson has been involved in pricing and/or forecasting of around half of the new molecular entity launches over the past five years.

Prior to founding Inpharmation, Gary spent two decades in the pharma industry holding senior positions, such as General Manager and Head of Global Marketing with a number of major blue-chip pharma companies, including SmithKline Beecham, Fisons and Schwarz. Gary Johnson is a sought-after industry speaker and conference chairman.

Gary is the author of Value Pricing for Market Access: Evidence-based pricing for pharmaceuticals and Sales Forecasting for Pharmaceuticals: An Evidence Based Approach - the definitive works on pricing and sales forecasting of pharmaceutical products. Other books include Monkey Business: Why the Way You Manage is a Million Years out of Date - finalist for the MCA Book Prize.

Gary Johnson joined C.E.L.forpharma’s faculty in 2007 and since then delivers the pharma industry’s only regular public course on evidence-based sales forecasting for pharmaceuticals. Since 2008 he also delivers the industry’s only regular public course on pharmaceutical value pricing. Both courses are organised in Brussels, London and Zurich.

John Weinman is Professor of Psychology as applied to Medicines at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neurosciences at King’s College London, and is also Head of Health Psychology (Europe) for Atlantis Healthcare. The main focus of his research has been on the ways in which patients’ beliefs about their illness and treatment affect self-regulation and self-management, with a particular focus on treatment adherence, across a wide range of major physical health problems. This research has been published in a large number of papers in peer review journals, and has provided the basis for many successful interventions for supporting patient self-management and treatment adherence.

He currently holds visiting professorships in University College London, Denmark and Ireland, and has been awarded a lifetime achievement award and an Honorary Fellowship by the British Psychological Society. He is a Fellow of the European Psychological Society, the American Academy of Behavioural Medicine Research, and the Academy of Social Sciences.

Prof. Weinman joined C.E.L.forpharma’s faculty in early 2014 and since then teaches on the Patient Adherence Course alongside Nathan O'Donnell from Atlantis Healthcare. Their course unravels the mystery of patient non-adherence while offering methodologies and insights for pharma, when addressing that issue, through patient services.

Patrik Frei, PhD, is founder and CEO of Venture Valuation AG, specialists in independent, third party assessment and valuation of emerging high growth companies in biotechnology and life sciences. He founded his company in 1999, based on his research at the University of St. Gallen and EPFL Lausanne, for which he collaborated with Novartis Venture Fund, which became his first client. Since then he has been involved in over 400 valuations for investors as well as biotech, pharma and medtech companies. Venture Valuation also runs Biotechgate, a global company, investors and licensing deal database.

Patrik was a board member and one of the original founders of Ineo, a holding company of the Swiss dental implant VC-backed firm Thommen Medical. He was also the Chairman of Ophthalmopharma, a Swiss based biotech ophthalmology company, where he successfully out-licensed a portfolio of 4 products. Furthermore, Patrik is member of the board of Kleinkraftwerk Birseck AG, a publicly quoted cleantech company. Patrik’s articles have been published in a number of scientific journals including “Nature Biotechnology”, “Drug Discovery Today” and other business publications. He has also lectured at Seoul National University, South Korea, EPFL Lausanne, University of St. Gallen and gives regular workshops on valuation.

Patrik Frei is a faculty member of C.E.L.forpharma since 2007. He developed and delivers the Pharma-Biotech Company & Product Valuation course for audiences of biotech, pharma and tech transfer executives. He consistently gets top ratings for his course.

Nick Proctor, PhD in Pharmacy, is a Director at Adelphi Access and has been a consultant to the pharmaceutical industry for over 17 years in areas ranging from the pre-clinical/FTIM interface, through clinical development and launch, to late lifecycle management. Over the past 9 years, he has led pricing, reimbursement and access projects for the majority of the world’s top pharmaceutical brands and manufacturers.

In addition to strategic pricing, Nick has a strong background in evidence synthesis, health economics and outcomes research as well as experience of working with payers in all major developed and emerging international health markets.

Nick Proctor joined C.E.L.forpharma’s faculty in 2015 and together with Mark Silvey delivers the highly praised Pharma Market Access course. 

Nathan O’Donnell is the Director of Client Services at Atlantis Healthcare UK, having worked at Atlantis Healthcare for 7+ years, with a specific focus on designing, developing and implementing global patient support programmes. He has extensive experience in patient support strategy, ensuring evidence-based behaviour change principles are at the heart of all solutions, driving effective and measurable outcomes that demonstrate a positive impact in the lives of patients, caregivers and HCPs.

Nathan O’Donnell joined C.E.L.forpharma’s faculty in 2017 and since then teaches on the Patient Adherence Course alongside Prof. John Weinman from Atlantis Healthcare. Their course unravels the mystery of patient non-adherence while offering methodologies and insights for pharma, when addressing that issue, through patient services.

Joeri De Haes is Regional Director Japan & Asia Pacific at Trilations, a strategy consultancy agency that works closely with most of the major pharmaceutical and medical device companies in more than 40 countries worldwide. He leads a global team of 25 consultants that designs and implements market & customer strategies for many top-10 pharma companies. He advises major pharma companies on a European and global scale in the fields of launch excellence, change management, multi-channel communication and other market strategies. 

Joeri De Haes has a PhD in applied economics and is a former professor of marketing at the University of Antwerp. During a decade of academic experience he has combined an analytical mindset with broad statistical knowledge to perform state-of-the art scientific research in the fields of (online) consumer behaviour and multi-channel marketing.

Kurt Arco is a Pharmaceutical Market Strategy expert at Trilations, a strategy consultancy agency that works closely with most of the major pharmaceutical and medical device companies in more than 40 countries worldwide, where he leads the Pharma Launch Excellence Team. He has worked with the pharmaceutical industry for 20 years.  Formerly with MSD (Merck & Co), where he led several major brand launches, Kurt has 15 years of launch experience within big and small pharma/biotech companies within Europe. Some of the major Launches he was involved in include Januvia® in Diabetes and Victrelis®/Zepatier® in Hepatitis C. He piloted several major projects in sales excellence and marketing excellence within the UK. 

Kurt holds a master degree in Biotechnology engineering and a post master degree in Marketing.  He joined Trilations in 2016, providing strategic consultancy advice across a wide range of clients and treatment areas, and helping clients understand and respond to the market challenges they are likely to face with their brands during every phase of a brand life cycle.

David Scott is a Licensing and Business Development consultant and a skilled negotiator who has closed a number of major deals for inward and outward licensing for pharmaceutical products, delivery systems and technologies. He has published widely and his best-selling report Scrip's Practical Guide to Pharmaceutical Licensing has been regarded by the international pharma-biotech licensing community as the quintessential reference for almost two decades.  

David is also an accredited Certified Licensing Professional and a member of the Licensing Executives Society and of the Pharmaceutical Licensing Group. He has spent the past 20 years as a freelance consultant for a range of worldwide clients, including top-ranking global companies, European regional companies, biotech companies, technology start-ups and universities. He currently sits on the board of two UK-based pharmaceutical businesses.

David Scott joined C.E.L.forpharma’s faculty in 2010 and since then delivers the only public course on pharmaceutical out-licensing. He provides carefully structured presentational material which he illustrates with personal examples.

Mark Silvey is a Director at Adelphi Access and has worked with the pharmaceutical industry for 19 years.  He provides strategic market access consultancy advice across a wide range of clients and therapy areas to help clients understand and respond to the market access challenges that they are likely to face with their brands.

Mark is responsible for leading international projects in market access and real world evidence. His previous experience encompasses market research, medical communications and strategic planning which enables him to deliver a wide strategic view of market access.

Mark Silvey joined C.E.L.forpharma’s faculty in 2011. His up-to-date knowledge of the European healthcare systems has been highly valued by our audiences of the Pharma Market Access course ever since.

Ben Harbour is Across Health’s Managing Director for the United Kingdom and brings with him more than 18 years of healthcare experience.

Ben has held sales and research positions within the pharmaceutical industry before focusing on global medical communications. Throughout this time, he has worked extensively throughout Europe, US and the emerging markets, providing the pharma, biotech and medical device industries with strategic guidance on a range of multichannel communication programmes at a corporate, regional, and brand level. His experience spans the clinical, medical and commercial phases of product development across a wide range of therapeutic indications. This end-to-end perspective has helped him to develop a clear understanding of client needs, allowing him to quickly get to the heart of critical scientific and commercial issues.

Ben Harbour joined C.E.L.forpharma’s faculty in 2015 and delivers The Strategic e-Medical Affairs Course which teaches the integration of digital in the overall medical affairs strategy and medical plans.

Beverly Smet is Managing Partner with Across Health and has a proven track record in the life sciences industry, with particular expertise in multichannel strategy and campaign management, virtual selling models, closed loop marketing and fusion med-ed strategies.

During the past decade, Beverly has also worked as a dedicated digital marketing consultant for the EMEA Web & Multichannel team of Johnson & Johnson as well as for some other top 10 pharma companies. Next to fusion marketing consultancy, Beverly has also been a speaker at international events such as eyeforpharma and NextLevel Pharma. Before his activities at Johnson & Johnson, Beverly worked five years for Royal Numico, a market leader for baby and clinical nutrition, where he created a world-class CRM loyalty model for young and expecting parents.

Beverly Smet joined C.E.L.forpharma’s faculty in 2014 on digital marketing programmes. He championed the development of the The Multi-Channel Patient Engagement Course which teaches hands-on methodologies that are backed up by patient research findings and that use digital multi-channel tactics to activate patients and to support them in their therapy. Beverly is amongst our highest rated speakers.

Chris Toller is a leading international consultant in pharmaceutical medical affairs. 

Educated at Westminster Medical School, London, Chris left clinical medicine in the 1980s and founded MEDIQ Ltd – one of the UK’s first specialist medical communications agencies.  Over the next 15 years, Chris led teams in the UK and USA that devised medical affairs strategies and implemented programmes for most of the world’s top 20 pharma companies.  As well as making important contributions to over 100 different medical brands, his skills have also been utilized by smaller companies and biotech start-ups – acting as a virtual medical affairs department. After the success of MEDIQ, Chris spent 2 years directing medical and commercial strategies for a US-based private biotech company before he joined the Choice Group in 2010.  Initially, he led the international medical communications business, Choice Healthcare Solutions, and was then invited onto the Group board as Head of Strategy in 2012. 

Chris currently works as Managing Partner at Havas Life Medicom UK.

Throughout his career, Chris has had experience in just about every therapy area, and has worked with medical affairs teams in Europe and the USA as well as emerging markets in Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. He has a reputation as a creative strategic thinker, an excellent communicator and an inspirational presenter.

Chris Toller joins C.E.L.forpharma’s faculty in 2016 with the launch of the Medical Affairs for Modern Pharma course. 

Neal Hansen, PhD, is the Managing Director of Align Strategy, an independent international consulting business focused on advising and facilitating superior decision making in lifecycle management and brand strategy. Neal has worked with many of the leading pharmaceutical and biotech companies, supporting pipeline, in-line and established brand planning, with a focus on competitive simulations, late stage lifecycle management (LCM) and emerging markets.

Prior to establishing Align Strategy and its predecessor Hansen Strategy, Neal was the Global Director of Healthcare Consulting within the Informa Group, leading both Phasic Strategy and Datamonitor Healthcare Consulting.

In this role and his previous role as the European Head of Consulting for Wood Mackenzie, Neal led commercial assessment, scenario planning and war gaming projects for numerous top tier and mid-cap pharmaceutical companies in Europe, the US and Japan. Earlier in his career, Neal held various senior roles within Datamonitor, including Lead Consultant and Lead Analyst for Strategic and Company Intelligence.

In 2012, he co-authored Pharmaceutical Lifecycle Management: Making the Most of Each and Every Brand (Wiley & Sons, 2012) and has previously authored several in-depth analyses on strategic issues affecting the pharmaceutical industry, focusing on LCM, pharmaceutical sales force strategies, competitive dynamics in mature and emerging markets and the changing nature of the global generics sector. He has chaired and spoken at numerous conferences in the field of LCM and the changing nature of the generics industry. His work has featured in Scrip, The Economist and The Wall Street Journal.

Neal Hansen is the master mind and speaker of C.E.L.forpharma LCM courses since 2007. His course always gets top ratings and is consistently highly praised by portfolio managers of mature/established brands.

Edouard Demeire uniquely combines in-depth pharma marketing expertise with academic rigour and a wealth of training experience all over the globe. His teaching, consulting and research focus is on systematic decision support tools and models for pharma marketing strategy.

Edouard has trained over 10000 executives in the pharmaceutical industry. He is a Visiting Professor at CEDEP (INSEAD) in Fontainebleau and faculty member at C.E.L.forpharma. He has given lectures in Solvay Business School and other leading academic institutions in France (SupdeCo), North America (MIT, University of Washington) and Australia (UNSW). In addition, he currently stages the marketing training curriculum at Roche and has run hundreds of workshops and consultancy projects at AZ, Eli-Lilly, Novartis as well as with many medium-sized pharmaceutical companies, across the globe.  

He co-authored a number of articles, marketing decision support systems and business simulations for the pharma industry with Prof. Marcel Corstjens of INSEAD. Edouard is co-author of GOOD PHARMA. How Marketing Creates Value in Pharma (Corstjens & Demeire, 2014) and he also developed the brand plan quality checklist, a tool for assessing the quality of your brand plans.

Edouard Demeire co-founded C.E.L.forpharma in 2005 and since then delivers The Pharma Brand Planning Course, an evergreen course that is highly valued by anyone wishing to build a career in pharmaceutical marketing. Since 2016, Edouard also delivers the course Principles of Pharmaceutical Marketing for Non-Marketing Functions. 

Vladimir Rogiers is a Senior Consultant with Across Health where he is responsible for developing integrated Pan-European multi-channel marketing plans for Across Health’s key accounts.

A self-confessed multi-channel & metrics fan, Vladimir’s key areas of expertise include CRM & customer experience, direct response campaigns, campaign localisation models, search engine marketing, data visualisation and multi-channel marketing strategy & metrics. He has over 10 years’ hands on experience in implementing and improving the multi-channel marketing capabilities of big players in the healthcare industry (e.g. Janssen) on both a local and regional level.

Vladimir joined C.E.L.forpharma’s faculty in 2016 as a co-speaker of the The Multi-Channel Patient Engagement Course which teaches how to activate patients and support them on their therapy using a multi-channel approach. Since 2018, he also delivers The Strategic Digital Pharma Marketing Course.

Roger Cox, PhD, has a 30-year career in business development within the healthcare industry, most recently with Johnson & Johnson as Executive Director, Licensing in J&J's worldwide Pharmaceuticals Business Development Group. He is currently a Senior Consultant with Plexus Ventures, a leading global pharmaceutical business development firm.

His broad experience in the industry includes licensing and business development with a small pharmaceutical company (Medgenix Group), managing investments in unlisted biotechnology companies as a Senior Investment Executive at British Technology Group, and being Commercial Director of the Cambridge-based immunodiagnostics company (IQ (Bio) Ltd).

Roger Cox was co-founder of the Pharmaceutical Licensing Group Benelux, Chairman of the European Pharmaceutical Licensing Council (2007-2009) and Member of the Editorial Board of the Business Development & Licensing Journal for the Pharmaceutical Licensing Groups.

Since 2013 Roger Cox has been presenting a negotiation course on pharmaceutical licensing for C.E.L.forpharma. The course is popular with Business Development and Licensing Executives from all parts of the Pharma and Biotech industries and is held 3 times a year in Brussels, Zurich and London.

Maaike Addicks was trained in the Netherlands as a physician. After several years of working in the psychiatric field, she moved to Australia and started her career in the pharmaceutical industry as a Medical Advisor with Organon. During those five years, she gained experience in KOL management, Advisory Board Meetings, CME, compliance, studies and training. She worked on products in different lifecycle stages, from preparing and launching an innovative new medication to being responsible for more established products. 

Maaike then moved to Organon’s headquarters in The Netherlands to become the Associate Director Medical Services Gynaecology, Europe. In this more strategic role she was not only responsible for a portfolio of contraceptives in Europe, but also part of the global strategic teams.

Following this international role, Maaike returned to the local affiliate level as Medical Director for Solvay Pharmaceuticals, where she was fully accountable for responsibilities and tasks of the Medical Department, and thus gained insight into the bigger picture of Medical Affairs and of a pharmaceutical company as a whole.

In 2010, Maaike joined Abbott (now AbbVie) where she managed and developed a diverse team of Medical Managers, Medical Advisors and MSLs. Her responsibilities included the development and successful rollout of the Affiliate Medical and Clinical Plan, budget control, the development and training of her team, and streamlining and clarification of the Medical Affairs roles and responsibilities.

Recently, Maaike founded Medical Affairs Solutions and joined C.E.L.forpharma’s faculty in 2017. She delivers The Value Adding Medical Science Liaison course.

Martin Austin has over 35 years of senior executive experience in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. Between 1996 and 2000, he was Roche’s global Head of Business Development for Pharmaceuticals. During that period he had a leading role in the establishment of Roche Genetics, the rationalization of the R&D portfolio which led to the establishment of companies such as Actelion and Basilea, as well as in the acquisition and integration of Boehringer Mannheim. After that, until January 2005, he was a Principal with Paul Capital Partners, a global private equity firm, leading their European Royalty healthcare activities. Since 2005, Martin has worked as an independent advisor providing strategic insight and practical support to clients regarding investments and business development opportunities,

Martin is the author of Business Development for the Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Industry (Gower, 2008) and Licensing, Selling and Finance in the Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Industries (Gower, 2012). He is also a Partner in Marram Advisors, a Swiss investment firm, and serves as a Board Member of several biotechnology companies.

Martin Austin has been on C.E.L.forpharma’s faculty since its foundation in 2005 and delivers the very popular The Pharma Business Development Course, a highly praised overview course.