Anne Thorez

As a Senior Director, Anne is responsible for assisting VCLS clients in creating long-term and sustainable patient engagement strategies that are integrated throughout the product development process.

Anne provides advice and support to healthcare companies to develop and drive high-priority patient-focused activities, helping them to minimize risk during clinical development by integrating essential and systematic patient perspectives, that will also fit with the expectations of regulatory and HTA authorities.

In her role, Anne also builds bridges between clients and patient organizations, providing a comprehensive analysis of the patient landscape in specific disease areas. She educates companies on meaningful and effective patient engagement and creates patient engagement roadmaps that align with clinical, regulatory, and market access strategies. Her scope of activities also includes creation of patient web-based surveys and interviews, conducting clinical gap analyses from the patient’s perspective and advising on strategies to understand patient views and preferences regarding clinical trial design, recruitment, and retention.

Anne brings over 30 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry, with a primary focus on renal and rare diseases. She has held various positions, including direct customer interaction in the field, EU and global medico-marketing, patient engagement strategist, and patient relationship manager. Anne has worked with several international companies such as Janssen and Sanofi, as well as start-ups like Dynacure and Clementia. This includes more than 8 years of expertise in patient engagement consulting.

During this time, before joining VCLS in 2022, she was, at Genzyme/Sanofi, a crucial pillar in the creation of a patient advocacy group for Pompe and Fabry diseases in Belgium. She also initiated a systematic truly patient-centric approach while developing patient-facing materials and disease awareness campaigns by working systematically and closely with patient organizations as experts. Within Clementia (now Ipsen), she closely worked with the clinical department and cross functional leadership team to create patient centric strategic direction associated to impactful activities. She also successfully developed strong interactions and collaborations with the Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva (FOP) and Multiple Osteochondroma (MO) patient communities at global level and individual country level.

Anne has a master’s in biology at University of Liège (Belgium), is a member of the Public and Patient Involvement (PPI) taskforce for Avicenna Alliance. She is based in Paris offices and she speaks French and English.