“I was on the ground during the HIV epidemic": Meet the scientist who’s sharing the spotlight with celebs at the Global Citizen Festival

Simply put: All of our products—whether from our consumer, medical devices or pharmaceuticals groups—have a big impact on global health. We address health and wellness needs from self-care to more complicated medical care.

In pharmaceuticals, for example, we’re aiming to prevent, treat and cure diseases like HIV, tuberculosis (TB), cancer, diabetes and mental illness. We’re also one of the biggest providers of essential surgical tools and instruments, including those used to treat traumatic injury, which is a pressing issue around the world. And our consumer group works to improve overall wellness through sun care, oral health, beauty and other products.

When I started my work in Africa, the life expectancy of an HIV patient was just six months. Today, we are closing in on providing patients a near-normal life expectancy—people are now surviving 30 to 40 years after diagnosis. While HIV patients still need to take medication every day, we can keep people healthy for the rest of their lives.

The challenge in less-developed nations is creating the healthcare infrastructure necessary for providing those medications to patients, and more simplified therapies that are easier to stick to over the long run. So we’re now working with partners on developing a long-acting injectable treatment that would mean patients could take just one injection a month.

What we really need, though, is a vaccine to prevent HIV in the first place. So we are working with many partners to conduct Imbokodo, the first efficacy study for a mosaic-based vaccine designed to prevent a wide range of viral strains responsible for the HIV pandemic.

I’ve visited trial sites for the Imbokodo study several times and the progress is very impressive. We need about 2,600 young women to enroll in the study, and in just a year, we’ve been able to get 25% of the way there.

In 2016, there were 1.8 million new HIV infections worldwide, and 43% of those were in eastern and southern Africa, with women and girls disproportionately affected.

So, together with partners like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC), among many others, we are doing this study in five southern African countries with this vulnerable population, in an effort to identify new prevention tools for them.

We’re working with governments and NGOs to provide a new breakthrough medicine to patients with multidrug-resistant TB— which has a very high mortality rate—in countries with the most people with the disease, including China, India, Russia and South Africa.
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We have contributed significant resources to deliver nearly 70,000 courses of this treatment to patients in need in 107 countries. To support this effort, we have worked with partners, including USAID and JSC Pharmstandard, on an important product donation program.

We also have a collaboration with the United Nations and the World Health Organization to provide 200 million doses of medication a year to children around the world suffering from intestinal worm infections.

And we’re still very involved in the fight against Ebola. Today, in collaboration with organizations like NIH, the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and the European Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), we’re bringing an Ebola vaccine to the finish line for those who need it, especially in central Africa.

I’m excited to showcase our commitment to global health, and to champion the people who are making the HIV vaccine study possible, including researchers, frontline healthcare workers and the patients taking part in the study.

South Africa has shown great leadership in how it is approaching TB and HIV. It’s an example of how public health around the globe can be improved through partnership between the public and private sectors. It takes all of us in the global community to make a difference.