Regular Board Member -Wilbur de Kruijf

Regular Board Member

Wilbur de Kruijf (Netherlands)

Wilbur de Kruijf is Director Inhalation Technology at United Therapeutics. He works from the UT Netherlands office in Enschede. Wilbur is currently the technical project lead in a large UT project, developing a novel inhaled therapy for pulmonary arterial hypertension, utilizing a soft mist inhaler technology, which Wilbur co-developed earlier in his career at Medspray and Resyca.

Wilbur has a background in Industrial Design Engineering from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, with further specialization in medical device development, user centered design and human factors. After university, Wilbur worked for the first 10 years of his career at a design consultancy firm (Indes BV), working on many different projects like car safety seats, manual and electric wheelchairs, hospital beds, patient lifting devices, x-ray scanners and drug delivery devices.

Wilbur started working in the field of inhaled drug delivery in 2006, at Medspray BV, developing spray nozzles based on silicon micro technology. After 15 years at Medspray, in January 2021, he became the chief technology officer of a new Bespak & Medspray joint venture, Resyca BV, developing and manufacturing a soft mist inhaler, based on pre filled glass syringes. In January 2023, Wilbur stepped out of Resyca and started a Pharma company, Thaerapy BV, putting a drug into the inhaler and starting to route that through clinical trials in Europe. In June 2024, Thaerapy’s company assets were sold and Wilbur then joined United Therapeutics.

Wilbur is a member of ISAM since 2011. Between 2016 and 2024 he has been the secretary of the Dutch aerosol research group MAD, organizing lecture evenings twice yearly. Wilbur regularly gives inhalation device technology workshop sessions to pharmaceutical PhDs and PostDocs, e.g. at the PDD events in Dublin and Istanbul, and has also been active as a speaker at events in the field of inhalation, like DDL and RDD.