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Joachim Bleys

Senior PartnerCarolinas - Charlotte

Global coleader of QuantumBlack for Life Sciences, AI by McKinsey; serves pharma, biotech, medtech, and private equity clients on advanced analytics, R&D, M&A, business development and licensing, integrations, strategy, and marketing and sales

A physician-epidemiologist by background, Joachim has extensive expertise across a wide spectrum of topics in healthcare. He coleads QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, for our Life Sciences Practice globally. Previously he led our R&D organization and operating model work, and McKinsey’s expert network overseeing our network of external advisers across 20 therapeutic areas and the firm’s community of medical doctors.

Joachim has worked with a wide range of senior executives across large pharma, small biotech, medtech, pharmaceutical services, and private equity. He aims to improve performance in R&D, commercial, and M&A through advanced analytics, refining strategy, overhauling operating models, and shaping and executing integration and transformation programs.

Within QuantumBlack, his mission is to help AI enable critical aspects of pharma and medtech to dramatically improve the speed at which innovative products reach appropriate patients. Joachim is passionate about the potential of AI to make drug discovery a more efficient process.

Joachim has published extensively on nutrition, outsourcing in biopharma, R&D transformations, biotech investing, and digital marketing. He was educated as a physician in Belgium, after which he obtained an MPH and PhD in epidemiology as a Fulbright Fellow at Johns Hopkins University.

Joachim is committed to the personal success of clients and colleagues across tenures and has been recognized for his people leadership. Outside of work, he is a hands-on father of two and enjoys reading and traveling.

Published work

Generative AI in the pharmaceutical industry: Moving from hype to reality,” McKinsey & Company, January 2024

A biotech survival kit for a challenging public-market environment,” McKinsey & Company, September 2022

CROs and biotech companies: Fine-tuning the partnership,” McKinsey & Company, June 2022

Transforming biopharma R&D at scale,” McKinsey & Company, May 2022

A new portfolio model for biotech,” McKinsey & Company, January 2021

Education

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
PhD, epidemiology
MPH, epidemiology and biostatistics

Ghent University
MD