‘Matladi N. Ndlovu
Dr. ‘Matladi N. Ndlovu, MSc, PhD, is Global Lead External Innovation at UCB in Brussels. An epigeneticist and systems thinker with 15+ years in immunology, she bridges cutting-edge science and business strategy, bringing diverse experts together around a shared mission: turning complex data into insight, and insight into lasting impact for patients.
‘Matladi has built public–private and pre-competitive digital partnerships from the ground up. Together with Novartis, she drove the creation of IMI HIPPOCRATES, aligning competing companies on a shared research topic within three months. The resulting 27-partner, €23M European consortium uses machine learning to predict and diagnose psoriatic arthritis earlier, with UCB as industry co-lead. She also brought UCB into IMI BIOMAP (2019–2025), which studied data and samples from 50,000 people with atopic dermatitis or psoriasis; ‘Matladi led UCB’s contribution to big-data integration and interpretation. In the US, she helped lay the foundation for FNIH AMP-AIM, a 20-organisation pre-competitive partnership mapping autoimmune disease at single-cell level. ‘Matladi also took Psorcast from idea to a smartphone app with clinically validated digital measures, within a pre-competitive digital biomarker consortium.
She then applied this data-and-partnership approach to hidradenitis suppurativa (HS), a chronic inflammatory skin disease, establishing the “Think HS” programme at UCB. Analysis of US insurance claims showed that HS symptoms affect men and women equally, not mostly women (3:1) as reported in the literature, doubling the estimated global patient population. ‘Matladi is now extending this work with consumer data and a generative AI foundation model covering more than 300 million patients, to find hidden patient populations at scale.
In Luxembourg, she will show how partnership-built data platforms and AI move precision medicine from consortium insight to patient impact.