Dr. Daniel Vasella, Former Chairman and CEO of Novartis joins the mPharma Board
I am pleased to announce that Dr. Daniel Vasella has joined the mPharma Board of Directors. Dr. Vasella is the former Chairman and CEO of Novartis, the fourth largest pharmaceutical company in the world with a market cap of over $200 billion. He helped create Novartis in 1996 by merging Sandoz with its rival Ciba-Geigy in one of the largest corporate mergers. Under his leadership, Novartis created Gleevec, the miracle cancer drug. Gleevec turned chronic myelogenous leukemia, or CML, from a certain death sentence into a manageable disease. Patients treated with Gleevec had a survival rate of 95% after five years. Before the drug’s introduction, about half of patients died within five years of diagnosis. In 2001, Novartis partnered with the WHO to sell Coartem at no profit to African governments. Since then, more than 850 million treatments have been provided under the Novartis Malaria Initiative, and this has contributed to a 66% decline in the malaria death rate in Africa.
In 2004, Time magazine named Dr. Vasella as one of the world’s 100 most influential people, and he was chosen as the Most Influential European Business Leader of the Last 25 Years by the readers of the Financial Times. Upon his retirement, he was named Honorary Chairman of Novartis. He currently sits on the boards of several companies including American Express and PepsiCo. He is also a trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
I first met Dr. Vasella in 2012 at the World Economic Forum in Davos. We kept in touch after Davos and as I thought about going back to Ghana to launch mPharma, he was one of the few people who took the time to listen to me and help me develop my ideas. Last year, I nervously asked him to consider joining our board. He agreed to come visit the company in Ghana and meet the team at our 3rd company retreat before making his decision. Soon after his visit, he agreed to join the board and also invested in the company. Dr. Vasella has always emphasized the importance of people development in organizations so I look forward to working closely with him to build mPharma into a talent magnet in Africa.
Dr Vasella will be joining an astute board of directors that includes Joanna Lee Schevelenko (Chief Business Officer at Atrium and an early Facebook Employee), Shravin Bharti Mittal ( Founder of Unbound), Sangu Delle ( MD of Africa Health Holdings), Walter Baddoo (Managing Partner of 4DX Ventures), Philip Sowah (Former CEO of Airtel Ghana), and Andrew Carruthers (Managing Partner at Novastar). Jim Breyer, Founder of Breyer Capital is a Board Observer.
