Ramanan Laxminarayan

Ramanan Laxminarayan Ph.D., M.P.H., FIDSA (born 1970 in Kampala, Uganda) is an

Laxminarayan was a key architect of the Affordable Medicines Facility-malaria (AMFm), an innovative financing mechanism to provide affordable, effective antimalarial drugs worldwide.^[6] The idea emerged from an Institute of Medicine panel chaired by economist Kenneth Arrow that called for global subsidies to ensure that artemisinin-based antimalarials were introduced to crowd out monotherapies that would result in resistance.^[7] Laxminarayan served on that panel and subsequently worked extensively on the design of the subsidy mechanism.^[8][9]  AMFm was launched in 2008 with a commitment from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.^[10]

Laxminarayan is a leading global expert on understanding of antibiotic resistance as a problem of managing a shared global resource. Through his prolific research, active public outreach and sustained policy engagement, Laxminarayan played a central role in bringing the issue of drug resistance to the attention of leaders and policymakers worldwide and to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2016.^[11][12]  His TED talk on antibiotic resistance which helped bring attention to this issue has been viewed more than a million times.^[13]  

During the Obama administration, Laxminarayan served on the U.S. President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology's antimicrobial resistance working group.^[14] He was subsequently appointed a voting member of the U.S. Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antimicrobial Resistance in 2016. He was appointed to a second term under the Trump administration.^[15]

Laxminarayan is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science, and a fellow of the Infectious Disease Society of America. He is a series editor of the Disease Control Priorities for Developing Countries, 3rd edition.^[16]

Immunization Technical Support Unit

In 2012, Laxminarayan created the Immunization Technical Support Unit (ITSU) that supports the immunization program of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare of the Government of India and which is credited with helping rapidly improve vaccination coverage and introduction of four new vaccines.^[17] The Mission Indradhanush campaign was conceptualized by ITSU and subsequently launched by India's Universal Immunization Programme. Among other innovations, Laxminarayan and his colleagues were instrumental in creating the electronic vaccine intelligence network (eVIN) with pilots in Bareilly and Shahjahanpur. eVIN is now the world's largest electronic vaccine logistics management system and covers all 731 districts across 36 states and union territories in the country.^[18][19]

Covid in India

Laxminarayan was among the earliest in warning about the potential devastation of COVID-19 in India. In a series of interviews in mid-March 2020, when India had fewer than 500 cases and 10 deaths, he predicted that over 200 million Indians would be infected and 1-2 million would die of the disease unless strict measures were put in place. His interview with the BBC,^[20] Barkha Dutt ^[21] and Karan Thapar^[22] which warned of a tsunami of Covid cases in India were viewed widely, and were believed to have prompted a widespread lockdown across India by the Indian government. In an oped published in the New York Times following the nationwide lockdown on March 24, 2020, Laxminarayan warned that India only had a few weeks to create an enormous, affordable and easily available testing infrastructure, contain local outbreaks and prepare for the avalanche of the coronavirus.^[23] In an interview with Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker, he predicted that it was "likely that Covid will just rip through the population, unless something fundamentally changes in the virus itself in India, for which we have no real evidence."

He subsequently led the largest study of Covid epidemiology in the world, which was published in Science.^[24][25]

Oxygen For India

During the second Delta wave of COVID-19 in India during March and April 2021, Laxminarayan and a team of volunteers were instrumental in organizing imports of oxygen equipment to solve the challenge of last minute delivery of medical oxygen to patients.  The campaign was supported by over 12,000 individual donors and large corporations including United Airlines, Logitech, UIPath, Yahoo and TechMahindra.  Laxminarayan's colleague Rahul Thakkar, who had been hospitalized for COVID-19 and for whom Laxminarayan had started the campaign died of the disease in April 2021. OxygenForIndia, a volunteer driven campaign that eventually imported over 20,000 oxygen cylinders and 3,000 oxygen concentrators to alleviate the need for medical oxygen.

Laxminarayan and Dr Indu Bhushan, the founding CEO of Ayushman Bharat together lead OxygenForIndia's work on the formation of a national oxygen grid with the objective that no Indian will die because of lack of medical oxygen anytime, anywhere.^[26] Laxminarayan also serves on the Lancet Global Health Commission on Medical Oxygen Security.^[27]

HealthCubed

In 2015, Laxminarayan founded HealthCubed, an award-winning start-up to improve access to healthcare and diagnosis for billions of people in both rich and poor countries. The company's flagship product, HealthCube XL, about the size of small dictionary, can carry out over 32 diagnostic tests including ECG, blood pressure, SpO2, hemoglobin, cholesterol, blood glucose and urine analysis, and deliver quality, reliable results within minutes to enable rapid diagnosis. Diagnostic algorithms and applications for patient registration, medical records, payment and referrals, enable patients to get test results that are saved in encrypted format. Currently HealthCubes are deployed across India and Africa and over 1,000,000 patients have already been tested using this technology. HealthCube is regulatory approved in more than 30 countries around the world including in Europe, South Africa, Ghana, Angola and Kenya. HealthCubed was among 16 finalists (selected from 340 entrants) for the Trinity Challenge, which aimed to bring the power of data and analytics to identify, respond to, or recover from disease outbreaks in innovative ways. HealthCubed was named biotech startup of the year by the Government of Karnataka in India for the year 2021, and was a finalist at the 2019 UCSF Digital Health Awards.

Selected awards and honors

Distinguished Alumnus, Academia and Research, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, 2019^[28]

Distinguished Alumnus, University of Washington, Seattle, 2020^[29]

Ella Pringle Keynote Lecture Medal, Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 2018^[30]

John LaMontagne Memorial Lecture, NIAID, 2016

O’Brien Lecture, University College, Dublin, 2016

Winter Lecture, 2015, University of Edinburgh^[31]

BP Koirala Memorial Oration, BP Koirala Institute of Health Sciences, Dharan, 2019^[32]

References