Top 10 Successful Magnetic Leaders Revamping the Healthcare -2020
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e strongly feel that we have a responsibility towards rare and genetic disease patients and their families in the Middle East region,” says Karim Smaira. He is the Co-founder and CEO of Genpharm and has worked in several geographies and served in different sales, marketing and management functions. Karim’s entire career has been focused on international operations and emerging markets. He left the corporate world and co-founded Genpharm in 2012. Since then he has been serving as its CEO. In an interview with Insights Success, Karim shares his experiences, challenges, and advises emerging business leaders to become more resilient, motivated and focused. Below are the highlights of the interview: How do you diversify your organization’s healthcare offerings to entice the target audience?
We are a very focused organization with a clear vision and an aspirational purpose. We strongly feel that we have a responsibility towards rare and genetic disease patients and their families in the Middle East region. Access to Orphan drugs has always been complicated due to lack of overall awareness for many of these diseases, diagnostic challenges and reimbursement issues due to the high costs of drugs in this sector. We have built our vision on tackling these challenges through “Bringing Cures to MENA Patients”. We diversify our offering by trying to overcome them by bringing breakthrough treatments and innovative solutions to as many of these rare diseases as we can. We always try to walk the talk and we are currently the first and only company that has launched gene therapy treatments in the region. As a director and business leader, describe the challenges you are having during the pandemic COVID-19 and what initiatives are you taking to mitigate them. The proportion of the outbreak and the impact of Covid-19 took everyone by surprise. This is a unique challenge. We had to adjust quickly to integrate the “new normal” of working remotely into our daily operations. Like for many, it accelerated our adoption of digitalization. We have for example conducted
Karim Smaira Committed to the Rare Disease Community 30 | DECEMBER 2020
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