Founder
Story.

Between a breakthrough and a patient.

I trained as a physician and began my career in clinical practice, spending years as a consultant physician in tertiary hospitals in India, in critical care and cardiac emergencies. That is where I first saw how much depends on what is available at the bedside, and how often the distance between best practice and what a patient receives comes down to circumstance rather than knowledge.

I then moved to the other side of medicine. First with Indian pharmaceutical companies, then with multinationals, and eventually leading Medical Affairs across Asia Pacific and the emerging markets.

That path gave me an unusual vantage point. I have been in the rooms where it is decided where a medicine goes first, what it costs, and how long a country waits for access to it. I have also sat with physicians for whom none of that had arrived, who knew exactly what their patients needed and had no way to provide it.

Inside the industry I worked closely across metabolic disease, cardiovascular disease, immunology, oncology, neurology, vaccines and rare diseases. Those therapy areas could hardly be more different from one another, and yet the obstacles were remarkably consistent. In every one of them each stakeholder was genuinely trying to contribute. What proved difficult everywhere was getting them to act as one, because priorities differ between them, and because compliance and regulatory boundaries limit what any single party can do alone.

I understand the pressures on each of the groups whose decisions have to align before a healthcare advance reaches a patient. Each of those groups is working on the same problem from a different side, and they seldom sit in the same room. My work has always been at the points where they meet.

That is what I bring to WNCDAF: the ability to connect the parts and bring fragmented contributors together, so that advances in prevention, diagnosis, treatment and care have a path to the patient rather than depending on where that patient happens to live.

Between a breakthrough and a patient there is a long stretch of work that too easily falls between institutions. WNCDAF is built to take it on.