LSIPR 50 2016: Giles Platford and Pardis Sabeti

Name: Giles Platford

Organisation: Takeda

Position: President, emerging markets business unit

Giles Platford has worked at Takeda since 2009 and is president of the emerging markets business unit. He has held a number of roles within the company including head of commercial operations and has headed the Middle East, Turkey and Africa region.

Platford holds a BA honours degree in business and marketing management from Oxford Brookes University in England.

During his time at Takeda, he has worked in Brazil where he successfully helped the company’s commercial performance as well as strategic mergers and acquisitions. One of these successful mergers was with Multilab, a branded generics and over-the-counter (OTC) products company in Brazil, which helped position Takeda as one of the top ten pharmaceutical companies in the country.

In 2014, Takeda announced that Platford had been promoted to head of emerging markets. It also revealed that its commercial goal was to adopt a flexible and targeted approach for each individual market, combining innovative, well-established, branded generics and over-the-counter products.

Emerging markets are expected to contribute 70% of total global pharmaceutical market growth between 2013 and 2017, according to IMS Health.

In February 2015, Takeda announced that it had opened offices in Singapore. The office is based in Biopolis, a biomedical complex, and houses its emerging markets business unit, the vaccine business unit and the regional research and development center.

The vaccine business unit is a laboratory for analytics and development of vaccines to protect against infectious diseases in the region. One vaccine targets dengue fever.

Platford said: “This move in Singapore places us to further strengthen Takeda’s commercial position and clinical development capabilities globally.

“Our new space in Singapore will allow us to more quickly address evolving market needs throughout the rapidly growing emerging markets, including Asia-Pacific.

“It gives us close-to-door access to important market information that will help accelerate the development of medicines needed for battling regional and global health issues,” he added.

Name: Pardis Sabeti

Organisation: Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

Position: Associate professor and senior associate member

“Let us not let the world be defined by the destruction wrought by one virus, but illuminated by billions of hearts and minds working in unity.”

These are the words of Harvard University scientist Pardis Sabeti and her lesson for the world following the outbreak of the Ebola virus in 2014.

Throughout 2014, the Ebola virus was rarely out of the news. The whole world watched anxiously as the fatal virus emerged in West Africa and spread rapidly across Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia and other parts of the world.

Shortly after the outbreak, Sabeti, who was working at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, received blood samples from Guinea nationals infected with the virus. What the data showed was that the virus was being transmitted between humans rather than from mosquito bites. The result was that virus trackers and those working in the field were able to identify where the virus came from and how fast it was spreading.

Noting that the issue was urgent, Sabeti subverted the traditional and slow route of publishing data on the genome sequence for the Ebola virus through an academic publication by simply putting the data online in June 2014.

Sabeti’s lesson was that defeating such outbreaks requires cooperation between all parties. “We had to work openly, we had to share and we had to work together,” she said.