patient-advocacy
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Sandra Abrevaya Knows How to Turn a Public Mission Into an Operating System
Before she built a company, Sandra Abrevaya learned how power actually moves - through campaigns, coalitions, city halls and the stubborn work of getting people into the same room.
Roohi Jeelani Is Building the Clinic She Wishes the System Had Designed
The physician-scientist spent years studying the gaps between research, clinics and patients. At Onto Health, she is turning those observations into an operating model - one deliberate fix at a time.
Tzvia Bader
Tzvia Bader is the CEO and co-founder of Leal Health (formerly TrialJectory), a New York-based, AI-powered decision support platform that matches cancer patients with FDA-approved treatments and clinical trials. A serial entrepreneur with roughly two decades in tech, she previously led a global business unit at Amdocs and founded startups Vocativ and KIDDOapp before turning to oncology after losing her mother to lymphoma and later facing her own melanoma diagnosis. She built Leal around a simple, insistent idea: patients, not geography or insurance, should decide which treatments they can reach.
John Crowley
John Francis Crowley is the President & CEO of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), the world's largest biotech trade association with 1,100+ member companies in 30+ countries. A Georgetown and Harvard Business School alumnus, Navy Reserve veteran who served in Afghanistan, and author of 'Chasing Miracles,' Crowley co-founded Novazyme Pharmaceuticals - which sold to Genzyme for ~$175-200 million - and later built Amicus Therapeutics from a 5-person startup into a global biopharmaceutical company. His life story inspired the 2010 CBS Films feature 'Extraordinary Measures,' in which Brendan Fraser portrayed him alongside Harrison Ford. Since taking the helm at BIO in March 2024, he has repositioned the organization around U.S. biotech competitiveness, FDA modernization, and patient advocacy.
Sanjay Prasad
Sanjay Prasad, MD, FACS spent nearly three decades as a neurotology and skull base surgeon in Washington, D.C. before turning entrepreneur. In 2014 he founded SurgiPrice, Inc. and its subsidiaries SurgiQuality and SurgiConnect to fix what he saw as a broken surgical referral system - helping patients find best-in-class surgeons, avoid unnecessary operations, and compare quality on procedure-specific metrics. The platform now lists tens of thousands of surgeons and partners with hundreds of surgery centers. He is also an author and health-equity advocate who founded the Race and Health Foundation.
Frank D. Lee
Frank D. Lee is the Chief Executive Officer and Board Director of Pacira BioSciences, a specialty pharmaceutical company pioneering non-opioid pain management solutions. A 30-year industry veteran who immigrated to the United States from South Korea, Lee built his career across Eli Lilly, Janssen, Novartis, and a 13-year tenure at Genentech where he oversaw $11 billion in global product sales. Before joining Pacira in January 2024, he led Forma Therapeutics through a transformative journey from drug-discovery startup to clinical-stage biotech, culminating in a $1.1 billion acquisition by Novo Nordisk in 2022. At Pacira, Lee is executing the '5x30' strategy - five bold objectives to transform the company into an innovative biopharma powerhouse by 2030, including advancing the PCRX-201 gene therapy for knee osteoarthritis, which has already earned FDA Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) designation.
Souvik Paul
Souvik Paul is the CEO and Founder of Aurie, a medtech company that built the first FDA De Novo-cleared reusable intermittent catheter system. A Harvard-educated designer and former J&J strategist, Paul was driven to start Aurie after witnessing a family member's struggle with catheter-associated infections following a spinal cord injury. His Oakland-based startup has raised $14.24M and is pioneering a no-touch, automatically disinfecting catheter system designed to transform care for the 600,000 Americans who rely on intermittent catheters.