Female leadership and lessening disease burden

As Women’s History Month comes to its final week, today’s podcast sees web editor Nicole Raleigh in conversation with Debra Weiss, COO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute (Gates MRI), discussing her role as a female leader in the field and the non-profit organisation’s work in developing novel biomedical interventions and lessening the burden of disease in LMICs.

Exploring Weiss’ unique journey to the work she does today with Gates MRI, their conversation covers the importance of the fundamentals of talent recruitment and establishing a quality management system, from opening the doors of the institute in 2018 to treating the first patient in 2019.

Gates MRI focuses on people who have talent and experience, but it’s not just about subject matter expertise. It’s about the ability to collaborate and adapting to different ways of working, also; at the institute, it’s not about commercial product. And team building and collaboration is part of Weiss’ role also as a female leader at the organisation, too. It’s a lot about the softer skills, she says, seeing the bigger picture, setting the strategy, and then leading and development.

Tuberculosis is a central focus of Gates MRI, and the conversation also touches upon the recent M72 vaccine, originally developed by GSK, and the impact it will perhaps have as potentially the first vaccine for pulmonary TB.

You can listen to episode 124a of the pharmaphorum podcast in the player below, download the episode to your computer, or find it - and subscribe to the rest of the series - in iTunes, Spotify, acast, Stitcher, and Podbean.