Prof. Dr. Harald Schmidt

Head of Department of Pharmacology & Personalised Medicine, Faculty of Health, Medicine & Life Science, Maastricht University

With a double degree in Medicine and Pharmacy, Harald Schmidt works in network and systems medicine to re-define what we call "disease" from a descriptive symptom- and organ-based to a mechanism-based approach by using big data, multi-target validation, new mechanism-based diagnostics, and rapid repurposing of registered drugs for new clinical applications by network pharmacology. He applies this to areas of unmet medical need, such as the development and commercialization of a first-in-class neuroprotective therapy in stroke, a therapy against a common and untreatable form of heart failure, and a therapy for resistant hypertension. He coordinates the H2020 project REPO-TRIAL on in-silico network pharmacology and the organ-agnostic European drug repurposing platform project REPO4EU. He was awarded an ERC AdG, and an ERC PoC grant, and chaired two COST actions. He co-founded the journals ‚Drug Repurposing‘ and ‚Network Medicine‘ and is on the Harvard-led Network Medicine Alliance board. His multi-national research experience in Academia (Germany, USA, Australia, Netherlands), Industry (Abbott Labs), and Biotech (Vasopharm) have led to high-impact publications (Hirsch index 102) with high socio-economic relevance such as drug and diagnostics patents, spin-offs and patient benefit. He has trained several successful scientists and clinical leaders and is a research- and evidence-based teacher, speaker, podcaster, and author (The End of Medicine As We Know It, Geheilt statt behandelt).

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