Sandeep (Sunny) Kishore sits on the UAEM Board of Directors. He is enrolled in the Weill Cornell Medical College/ Rockefeller/Sloan-Kettering Institute Tri-Institutional MD-PhD program.
This past weekend saw the convergence of hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students to Yale University for the 8th annual Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM) conference. Earlier in the week, on Nov 9th, UAEM scored a major victory, having driven 6 major universities and now the NIH and CDC to sign on to a statement of principles that facilitate global access to university health inventions, including new drugs and vaccines. The victory is an impressive one and comes nearly eight years after UAEM’s first victory, slashing the price of the first-line HIV/AIDS drug d4t by 97% by brokering generic provisions. On the heels of this victory, keynote speaker Dr. Peter Hotez challenged UAEM to broker a similar victory for the innovation gap, particulary for the NTDs. As university students, he implored the audience to find creative ways to engage our universities for innovation- even proposing a novel seed fund for neglected diseases at each university where each institution is obliged to put in an equivalent salary of the university president (e.g. $1.7 million at Vanderbilt).
On the NTD control side, UAEM has gone global having invited and engaged our first affiliate in Tanzania at the Weill Bugando Medical College through Evance Mmbando. Evance made a call to action for more collaboration with universities in the global South on NTDs and described his new NGO comprising 11 students and one faculty supervisor devoted to schistosomiasis elimination in the lake Victoria basin. He made a specific call to action to global stakeholders (students to Ministries of Health) to engineer a mass drug administration campaign for praziquantel, a medicine that comprises over 60% of the cost of the rapid-impact package.
