Professor Dr Ulf Nehrbass, CEO of the Luxembourg Institute of Health, discusses new ways of thinking about disease and medical research.

Ulf Nehrbass has become a relatively famous scientific face in Luxembourg due to his role as an advisor to the government on COVID-19 strategies. We touch on COVID in this conversation, but recognising a general ennui around the subject, we push on. Ulf wants to get on with the job in hand as CEO of the Luxembourg Institute of Health, LIH.

Nehrbass' track record saw him lead and found the Institut Pasteur Korea, where he sourced an international team to become one of the first translational drug discovery institutes. Ulf was also CEO and founder of Qurient Therapeutics, a Biotech near Seoul, IPO since in 2016. Since then he created a French German translational centre Ksilink combining INSERM, Sanofi, Alsace Biovalley and BioPro.

Always at the leading edge of novel ways of thinking about drug discovery and the changing language around how we view various diseases, Ulf explains how we can divide diseases into different sub-groups, with all sorts of patterns on a macro scale (biometrics) to the more established biochemistry around genes.

Fascinatingly, Ulf explains how many diseases, or groupings of disease, can be attributed to an over- or underactive immune system. And therefore, figuring out one's belt of healthy immunity can equal disease prevention.

Personalised medicine, precision medicine, translational medicine... it's all in here. And, according to Ulf, it's an extremely exciting time to be involved in medical research which is about to explode with new ideas, aided by AI and robotics.