Overview
Bernard Vrijens is chief executive officer and scientific lead of AARDEX Group, based in Liège, a role he has held since February 2018. Since September 2009 he has also been an invited professor at the University of Liège.
Vrijens first joined AARDEX Ltd. as a senior statistician in May 2001, remaining until September 2005, and returned to AARDEX Group as general director from January 2010 to May 2012. In between he was chief scientist at Pharmionic Systems from October 2005 to December 2009. He then served as chief science officer at MeadWestvaco Healthcare from June 2012 to June 2015 and at WestRock Company until February 2018.
Earlier in his career he was an expert at the Institut scientifique de la Santé publique – Louis Pasteur, a PhD student and researcher at Ghent University, manager of biometrics at Pfizer Animal Health, a research assistant at CHU de Liège and a scientific collaborator at Hasselt University.
He holds a BSc in mathematics from the University of Liège, an MSc in biostatistics from Hasselt University and a PhD in applied mathematics and informatics from Ghent University.
Career history
In the news
- Medication adherence is not a single behaviour, yet most of the theories we use to study it treat it as one. A new systematic review in Patient Preference and Adherence (Alfian et al., 2026), co-authored by AARDEX Group’s CEO Bernard Vrijens, Ph.D., examined how theoretical frameworks are used in empirical adherence research. The authors mapped each framework against the three phases of the ABC taxonomy: initiation, implementation and discontinuation. 🧭 Methods #PubMed and #Scopus were searched with no restriction on publication
- Vaccines are one of the quietest success stories in medicine. 🧬 When they work, nothing happens, and that “nothing” is millions of lives. Keeping that progress going takes science, manufacturing, policy and a lot of people in the same room. That’s why I'm glad to be part of The World Vaccine Congress Europe 2026 in Amsterdam these days. A personal highlight: running into my former colleague and good friend Joe Keenan. Some of the best moments at a congress happen between the sessions. Thank you to the organizers and everyone I met.
- Amsterdam, RAI, three days, 2,000+ people who think about vaccines for a living. Our CEO and Scientific Lead, Bernard Vrijens, Ph.D. is at The World Vaccine Congress Europe this week. If you spot him in the halls, say hello. He’s always up for a good conversation. Until 21 October at RAI Amsterdam. #WVCEurope #WorldVaccineCongress #AARDEX
- Let’s address the elephant in the room. We cannot solve an issue that we are reluctant to discuss openly. 👏👏Congratulations to Non on your important work in bringing this topic to the forefront and helping advance the conversation. A timely and valuable contribution. #HealthcareInnovation #ClinicalTrials #PatientCentricity
- When you know patients actually took the drug, you can trust what your trial is telling you. Pill counts and patient diaries can’t give you that certainty. Electronic dosing data can. Our CEO Bernard Vrijens, Ph.D. co-authored a new review in Therapeutic Innovation & Regulatory Science with Bruce B., Els Goetghebeur, Richard Zink, Rakhi Kilaru and Wallstrom, G.. Their argument: treat adherence as a trial risk from day one, measure it objectively and plan it into the estimand under ICH E9(R1). There’s a practical upside too: trials
- Just published in Pharmacological Reviews! “Medication adherence: An overlooked critical determinant of pharmacological effectiveness”. A new open-access review by Michel Burnier, Michel Azizi, @Pankaj Gupta, Przemyslaw Kardas, Marie P. Schneider and our CEO & co-founder Bernard Vrijens, Ph.D. Vrijens. The prescribed dose is only a surrogate for the dose actually taken. Yet adherence is still treated as an operational detail rather than a pharmacological variable. A few points that stood out: 🔹 In trials that failed their
- We were really pleased to see how much interest Bernard Vrijens, Ph.D. presentation generated yesterday at the 8th Drug-Device Combination Products conference. Bernard received a lot of questions after the session, possibly the most we’ve seen after one of our recent presentations, so we thought it would be useful to share the slides openly here as well. The presentation looks at product forgiveness, exposure drift and what happens when real-world dosing starts to deviate from the intended regimen. If you have any additional
- We love when people understand what patient adherence really means. And we love it even more when highly qualified experts come together to improve it. This week, Bernard Vrijens, Ph.D. joined the 8th Drug-Device Combination Products Summit in Amsterdam, bringing #medication #adherence into the conversation around drug-device combination products.
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