BEP grad Inder Singh orchestrates affordable malaria drug development

Malaria's growing resistance to older treatments such as chloroquine has led the World Health Organization to recommend ACT drugs -- artemisinin-based combination therapies. ACT drugs are scarce and expensive however, because the key raw ingredient is a plant extract long used in Chinese medicine that is difficult to produce.

Inder Singh, a recent graduate of HST's Biomedical Enterprise Program (BEP) has worked for the last year and a half at the Clinton Foundation to structure agreements with suppliers that will begin to solve both the price and scarcity problems, and bring ACT to millions of people in areas where malaria is a major public health problem.

Now Director of Drug Access for the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative (CHAI), Singh negotiated business agreements with companies in India and China that cover every link in the production chain, from the extraction of the raw ingredient to the manufacturer of the final drug. This comprehensive set of agreements lowers the business risk and provides the incentive companies need to invest in building the supply of affordable ACT. "Next year alone, up to 12 million more people can be treated with these highly effective drugs with the available funding. This means that up to 40,000 additional lives could be saved," Singh estimated.

And he says that HST contributed to this global health breakthrough, as well.

"My experience in HST's Biomedical Enterprise Program (BEP) made an enormous contribution to the work," says Singh, "not only in helping me understand the issues and develop a strategy to negotiate the agreements with the drug companies, but in getting the job in the first place! I don't know that I would have gotten it without the Sloan and HST training and credentials.

"I know pharmaceutical executives and even [joint degree] MD MBAs who are jealous of the experience I got in the BEP program. The MD-MBA students enter as physicians-in-training, whereas we enter like entrepreneurs-in-residence." says Singh. "The BEP and HST programs are unique; they foster the 'clinician-scientist-engineer-entrepreneur' in ways that you cannot find elsewhere," he added.

BEP students have their own version of a clinical rotation; one that views medicine through the lens of business enterprise. Students learn the strategy and rules governing the design and conduct of human studies and clinical trials. They interact with academic physicians in the process of developing new technology, and even perform "autopsies" on failed biomedical enterprises. "Rox Anderson's clinical course [HST 211] brought everything together in a practical way and it was certainly the capstone of my graduate school experience," says Singh. "It's that unique and powerful."

Originally headed to med school, Inder Singh got involved in a community service project during college at the University of Michigan and started "Dance Marathon, Inc.", a fundraising effort that has become a successful non-profit institution, raising millions for children's rehabilitation services in south Michigan.

"Starting this organization was exceptionally fulfilling, and still one of the things I am most proud of," he says. "I found a thing that motivated me — social entrepreneurship. It was a life changing experience." Singh went on to train at MIT Sloan, Harvard's Kennedy School, and HST. "It has all come together in this position at the Clinton Foundation. The people here are incredibly inspiring, intelligent, and motivated, and they bring a business mindset to the problems associated with global health."

"I certainly want to stay tied to global health, but I will eventually return to the private sector, perhaps to another start-up. I don't believe that we have to be in the non-profit world to do good work."