Washington, DC, April 6, 2016—At a major gathering of leaders in the tuberculosis field, held in Washington DC, Wave 80 founder and Board of Directors chairman Dr. Daniel Laser was joined by Palu Dhanani, Managing Director of leading Kenyan pharmaceutical firm UCL, in giving a joint keynote address on best practices in life sciences joint ventures for high-disease-burden countries.
At the event, organized by the Critical Path to TB Drug Regimens, sharing the keynote address allowed Laser and Dhanani to go into depth on how the two firms’ partnership exemplified thoughtful leveraging of complementary core competencies. UCL brought to the partnership its highly trained staff’s experience with producing dozens of formulations, along with its state-of-the-art facility located just outside Nairobi. Wave 80 brought its scientists and engineers’ deep understanding of the technologies used in EOSCAPE single-use assay cartridges that came from having designed the innovative cartridge architecture from the ground up, using Liquid Micropiston technology to enable the EOSCAPE system’s exceptional performance in a compact and cost-effective system designed for diverse clinical laboratory environments.
Other major themes highlighted by Dhanani and Laser during the keynote presentation included the paramount importance of close cooperation between the quality assurance teams at the joint venture partners and best practices in cold chain management.
Also among the CPTR meeting presenters were Jim Gallarda, head of diagnostics at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as senior executives from leading firms working in TB including Otsuka, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, and GlaxoSmithKline.
