Rob van Wijk
Assistant professor
- Name
- Dr. R.C. van Wijk
- Telephone
- +31 71 527 4505
- r.c.van.wijk@lacdr.leidenuniv.nl
- ORCID iD
- 0000-0001-7247-1360
Rob van Wijk is Principal Investigator “Translational Immuno-Pharmacology” at the Division of Systems Pharmacology & Pharmacy.
More information about Rob van Wijk
News
Rob van Wijk performed his PhD research on ‘Translational pharmacokinetics-pharmacodynamics in zebrafish’ at the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research in collaboration with the Institute of Biology Leiden, under the supervision of prof. dr. Piet Hein van der Graaf, prof. dr. Herman Spaink, and dr. Elke Krekels. This multi-disciplinary project with collaborators from three different research institutes of Leiden University and two international partners, Uppsala University and Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard University, focussed on the quantification of internal drug exposure over time, and drug effect over it concentration for three different drugs (paracetamol, isoniazid, isotretinoin) in the zebrafish and zebrafish larva.
Rob van Wijk continued his academic career with two postdoctoral positions. From March 2020 to March 2022, he worked at Uppsala University with prof. dr. Ulrika Simonsson. In this postdoc, he consolidated his advanced computational skills in pharmacometrics, working on preclinical and clinical projects. He collaborated in 2 consortia, and developed innovative analysis methods that became standard in international preclinical and clinical tuberculosis projects. He also analysed a Phase 3 COVID-19 vaccination trial, for which he developed novel techniques to include seasonality of pandemic waves, and a reproducible, automated analysis method to accelerate the trial analysis.
For his second postdoc (May 2022-Oct 2023), Rob van Wijk joined prof. dr. Rada Savic’s group at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), which has a strong track record in Global Health drug development, such as shortening tuberculosis treatment. To train himself in achieving an impact on drug development, he collaborated with stakeholders such as big pharma, non-profit organisations (TB Alliance, Gates Foundation), and governmental institutes (NIH/CDC, FDA) to prepare for, and analyse clinical trials (Phase 1-3) in tuberculosis and HIV. This included the development of an open-access translational tool to predict Phase 2a clinical results based on preclinical data, through which he supported the development of four novel drug candidates.
Currently, Rob van Wijk is a principal investigator “Translational Immuno-Pharmacology” and assistant professor at the Division of Systems Pharmacology and Pharmacy at Leiden University.
Assistant professor
- Science
- Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research
- LACDR/Pharmacology
- Vice-Chair Global Health Community