The group is composed of 10 eminent experts with a broad spectrum of knowledge and expertise as researchers and clinicians working on COVID-19 health products; experts in access to medicines, diagnostics, vaccines, and other health products; specialists of public health-oriented intellectual property; technology transfer experts; business development experts; experts in pricing, procurement, needs estimation and/or regulation of medicines. Other members of the committee include:
- Scholar Professor of Law Florida State University College of Law Frederick Abbott
- Senior Researcher and Head of the Medicines Policy Department National School of Public Health Oswaldo Cruz Foundation Jorge Bermudez
- Intellectual Property and Access Leader Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative Pascale Boulet
- Independent Vaccinology Researcher and Consultant Jan Hendriks
- Senior Health Economist/Senior Health Policy Analyst Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Ruth Lopert
- Associate Professor, Consultant Physician, Clinical Pathology Assiut School of Medicine Asmaa Osman
- Professor of the Practice and Director of the Innovation + Design Enabling Access (IDEA) Initiative Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Anthony
- Senior Advisor Global Access in Action Program of the Berkman Klein Center, Harvard University Padmashree Gehl Sampath
When looking into the biography of Prof. Neelika Malavige, she is a Professor and Head of the Department of Immunology and Molecular Medicine, University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Sri Lanka, and also a visiting academic at the University of Oxford since 2008 after completing her doctoral studies at the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford. She has chaired many committees and played a distinguished role in them. Among them, serving as a member of the Executive Committee of the International Society of Infectious Diseases since 2020, serving as an expert member on several governmental COVID-19 related technical advisory groups are some of them. She leads a large research group working on dengue and COVID-19. Not only that, she is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in London the Royal College of Pathologists in 2015. Her work on dengue is commendable and she has focused on factors that lead to severe dengue, identification of biomarkers, and mediators of vascular leak in dengue. During this pandemic situation, her work on COVID-19 is mainly related to immune responses to COVID-19 vaccines, immunopathogenesis, and determining correlates of protection against COVID-19. She has strong research collaborations with the University of Oxford and her laboratory is a part of the A2CARES, which is one of the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases. She has bagged many awards and received many local and international grants.
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