Nico Vandaele | Prof. dr.
KU Leuven, Access-To-Medicines Research Centre

Nico Vandaele obtained a PhD in Business Engineering, Operations Management and Operations Research in 1996. Being a professor at KU Leuven since then, his research focus was on (bio-pharma) supply chains. In the last decade, the focus was on embedding the supply chain in broader health eco-systems. Together with Dr. Catherine Decouttere, Nico Vandaele established 10 years ago the multi-disciplinary Access-To-Medicines Research Centre, ATM (https://feb.kuleuven.be/Access-To-Medicines). Within ATM, the research is based on qualitative and quantitative models for health eco-system (re-)design. The scope is on immunization (childhood, emerging tropical diseases, Covid-19), antivirals (HIV, Covid-19), family planning, diagnostics, medical devices and pandemic preparedness. Geographically we have a strong collaboration with African, European, Asian and South-American partners. We study this from a systems perspective, connecting health supply, health care delivery and demand modelling (e.g. hesitancy and uptake). In order to research these complex problems, we established a multi-disciplinary team within ATM (biomedical, humanities and engineering backgrounds) as well as collaboration with renowned international research units from bio-medical science and systems modelling. The key future research directions are on sustainability (in all aspects) of the proposed health system interventions, on impact in terms of effective implementation of the research results and outcomes and most broadly on One Health, for instance the impact of climate change on sustainably health system design and pandemic preparedness. Nico Vandaele and Catherine Decouttere (as Director) are co-founders of ‘Leuven One Health’, a brand new Research Institute of the KU Leuven (KU Leuven organigram - Leuven One Health – KU Leuven One Health Instituut). We collaborate with partners from Europe, Africa, Americas and Asia, and are have projects running in Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, South-Africa and new collaborations underway in Senegal, Guinée, DRC, Nigeria but equally in Brazil, South-Korea and Indonesia. Specifically in vaccine manufacturing systems modelling, we collaborate with key manufacturers as well as organizations such as HERA, ZEPAI, A-CDC (PHAHM), CEPI, PATH, Gates Foundation, among others.