 Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon and welcome to this press conference from the 49th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum here in Davos. It's day number four of the World Economic Forum. It's Davos Thursday, so to speak. Thank you for being in the room with us today and thank you for watching, whether you're watching on Twitter, Facebook or our website. Thank you for tuning in. This press conference is dedicated to the launch of an exciting new partnership, a public-private partnership, I should say, between Ghana and Novartis and additional partners. I'll introduce my panel. Any moment to you now, I just want to express from the World Economic Forum's perspective as well, that we pride ourselves of being a platform for these important initiatives. You might have heard of GAVI, you might have heard of the Global Fund, so we're very excited to add another very important initiative to this list of initiatives. Without further ado, let me introduce my panel to you. To my immediate left, I'm pleased to be joined by the Honorable Kwaku Agiman Manu, who's the Minister of Health of Ghana. To his left, we're joined by Dr. Anthony Nzia Azare, who's the Director-General of the Ghana Health Service. Right at the heart and center of our panel, we have Vas Naram Simhan, who is the CEO of Novartis. To his immediate left, we're pleased to be joined by Professor Kwaku Ohenefrem-Pon, who is the President of the Sickle Cell Foundation of Ghana and Program Coordinator for the National Newborn Screening Program for Sickle Cell Disease, and I think it's fair to say one of the leading global authorities on a sickle cell. And we're joined today, last but definitely not least, by Petra Lau, the Global Head of Public Affairs Policy at Novartis. Thank you very much for being here. And I would be amiss not to recognize that we have in the audience His Excellency, the Vice President of Ghana, Dr. Mahamudu Babumya. Thank you for being here with us today for this important announcement. Thank you very much, Minister. Without further ado, let me hand over to you. We would like to hear from you why is sickle cell so important for Ghana, and why is it such a priority for your government? Please. It's on. Thank you very much. Sickle cell has been the country years before Yvonne I was born. But we haven't gathered resources and having given sickle cell the needed attention that it needs. At the moment, WHO actually has looked at sickle cell in West Africa. And in 2006, the WHO actually reported that sickle cell disease contributes the equivalent of more than about 9% of under five deaths in West Africa, and up to close to about 16% of under five deaths in individual West African countries. Ghana, unfortunately, is packed with West African countries. And therefore, this thing is right with us. We have in the past had renowned scientists who have done a lot in sickle cell. But we haven't been able to allocate budgetary resources to enable them to actually do what they should do best for us, to find a solution to the problem. And that is why at the moment, I'm going to see sickle cell as a high-profile area that we should tackle. Thank you. Thank you very much, Minister. Anthony, let me jump right to you. You work, especially on the implementation of the work here, and you work closely with the Sickle Cell Foundation, share with us your perspective. And what are the next steps you see for implementation? Please. Thank you very much. The next steps are, one, the cooperation that you're having, the partnership. We want to use the cooperation, the partnership, to make sure that the sickle cell disease bedding in Ghana, for that matter in Africa, when we finish, will come down. Two, we are also going to make sure that the treatment is also given to everybody, affordable treatment, which is sustainable. And this we are going to do through, already we have done the standard treatment guideline for sickle cell. And we are going to do a failed test quickly, which you take about a year. And we have experience already in Ghana in commercial, the sickle cell, newborn screening. So we are going to stand on that one and make sure we have centers of excellence in all the 10 regions, now 16 regions. So every center, there will be center of excellence over training. We also have diagnosis so that we have at least one sickle cell screening center in every region. And we are also introducing new treatment, hydrocelluria. As I speak now, it has been, the Food and Drugs Authority of Ghana has given it the license to bring it into the country. And I'm sure it's already in the country. So we are going to also make sure we give this hydrocelluria, which has been used, some old drug, which reduces the disease complications. And we are introducing it in Africa and for that matter in Ghana for the first time. Novartis, one of our partners is making sure that it's also affordable. And we want to make sure this treatment is also sustainable. And we are going to stand on this partnership to also get to other partners who are very much interested, which I'm sure Novartis and the Sickle Cell Foundation Minister of Health and Ghana Health Service will build on. And going forward, we know we need also data. And when we get the data, then we can then plan and make it sustainable. So we are going to do a lot of research. And we are also talking to Novartis, which they've agreed that Ghana will be used for also testing of any innovative drugs in Sickle Cell. And if you do all these things together, we are sure that Ghana will be the gateway for Sickle Cell management in Africa. And Novartis is so kind enough to bring also the price of hydrocelluria also down to be affordable. And we are also trying to put it on the National Health Insurance Benefit Package. So these are all the things that we have been doing. And already, as I said, the Sickle Cell guidelines already in place. And I'm sure we'll carry this in once the agreement has been signed already within the next few months. Ghana will be a sure piece for Sickle Cell disease in Africa, sub-Saharan Africa. Thank you. Thank you very much. And once Anthony already hinted to your role as the CEO of Novartis or of your company in this partnership, but maybe you can expand a little bit on that why Novartis is engaged here and what you're bringing to this partnership. Please. Thank you. And we're incredibly proud to announce this partnership with the Ghana government, the Ghana Health Service, the Ghana Ministry of Health to tackle Sickle Cell disease in Africa. This is really part of our long-term legacy as a company. For over 100 years, we've been working on antibiotics. We've been working on malaria. We've been working to reimagine medicine to extend and improve patients' lives. In the area of public health, we've been responsible for the donations and leprosy for over 30 years. We innovated Coartam, one of the first artems-in-in-based malarial drug that is now approaching its billionth treatment, now distributed in Africa. And we also work quite a bit now in access to medicines as we've continued to evolve our approach with our work through Healthy Families, Novartis Access. And most importantly, our recent announcement of our access principles, where we've committed to bring new innovations in our pipeline to low and middle-income countries as fast as possible, with a goal of eventually being able to bring these medicines within a year to populations around the world. So when we saw the opportunity to tackle an incredibly important disease like Sickle Cell, where children are dying before five years of age, 50% to 80% of the children born with Sickle Cell in Sub-Saharan Africa are at risk of death at that age range, we wanted to act. And we were really fortunate to meet incredible partners like in the Ghana Health Service, Ghana Ministry of Health, and the Sickle Cell Foundation in Ghana to decide to really take action. And we've done that around three different dimensions. The first is in treatment. So in treatment, we'll be working with the government to help set up the appropriate treatment guidelines. As the minister mentioned, we are working already to, we've already registered hydroxyurea, which has recently been shown in the New England Journal of Medicine to be really an incredible treatment for patients with Sickle Cell disease. We're working to then take that medicine into the pediatric population to make the first pediatric formulation and make that available to children in Ghana. The second is around diagnosis. We want to support the Ghana Health Service in building centers of excellence and screenings centers. We need to screen these children very early, identify that they have Sickle Cell disease, and ensure they get treatment with penicillin and hydroxyurea so we can prevent needless deaths. And lastly, we want to advocate. We want to educate across Ghana to ensure that patients and families understand that these resources are available so that we can really tackle Sickle Cell disease in the country. The fourth element is on research. And we are looking now to perhaps bring one of our first clinical trials outside of infectious disease into Ghana as part of our work to develop a drug called chrysanlizumab, which is another advanced treatment for Sickle Cell disease. So a comprehensive approach. My sincere hope is that this will lead to catalyzing a transformation across Sub-Saharan Africa, that many more countries will join this movement so that we can make Sickle Cell disease a manageable disease for children and families and hope one day we can cure it from the continent. Thank you, Mass. Professor, the minister has already so eloquently described the burden and importance of Sickle Cell for Ghana, but I'd like to invite you to share a bit more a deeper insight on the burden of the disease on the population, please. Sickle Cell disease is an old disease. Almost every African language has an expression for the pain that Sickle Cell disease causes. Sickle Cell disease is related to malaria. The gene that causes Sickle Cell disease, in fact, affects over 300 million people in the world. These are healthy carriers of the gene, and we now understand that those people, especially as young children, survive malaria better than those with regular blood. So here's a gene that has protected so many lives, but in a double dose or when it's inherited with another abnormal gene that promotes sickling, it becomes a disease. We know now that there are 450,000 babies are born every year in the world with Sickle Cell disease. More than 80% of them are born in Sub-Saharan Africa. Many of the children born in Sub-Saharan Africa are undiagnosed, untreated, and they die. So we lose about 50% to 80% of them by five years of age. A lot of research has gone into Sickle Cell disease, understanding the disease itself and the gene that caused it. We have learned enough about this disease to learn knowledge to other genetic conditions, but those who suffer Sickle Cell disease around the world have not benefited as much. And so we hope that with partnership, with the major companies such as Novartis, that there is no recognition that Sickle Cell disease is an important public health problem in Africa, in the Middle East, in India, and now where people from those origins have also moved around the world has become a global disease. So this initiative, this partnership, will bring attention to Sickle Cell disease throughout the world. The cause of Sickle Cell disease is not just in those who are affected, the families, the communities, and all that they have to go through with this disease. It's a major public health problem that has not been fairly addressed. Thank you, Professor Petra. It's one thing to acknowledge the importance of this disease, but it takes some work to get to a partnership like this. This is not something that a company like Novartis or any other company does every day. This is quite an important step. Maybe you can talk us through a little bit the importance of these type of partnerships. Sure, Georg. So in global health, there's a widespread understanding that we cannot solve the problems alone. Partnerships are the paradigm of the day, but it's hard to get these partnerships actually right. And often, if we are looking to this industry, we are often being asked simply to reduce the price of medicine, but our experience is clear. If we just do this, this is not going to help patients at all. So we are really, really proud that in this partnership, we can work together with the government of Skarner, the health services, the academic society to develop an end-to-end process, as well as explain its screening, treatment, research, and advocacy. So the patient will have a seamless way finally through the treatment system. Also, it's a multi-stakeholder partnership. So it's everybody who is involved in this is on board. And I'm pretty sure if we, as we implement this, we will find we will need other partners and we were more than happy to invite and join them in. And maybe the last point for success here is we are incredibly proud. We have been working with the government of Ghana and being very clear on what is everybody's responsibility, what is the incentives, which resources are required. This good conversation at the beginning is the best guarantee for success that there are no disappointments later. And so we hope with these three ingredients, we will make this a success. And I'm sure, Georg, we would love to come back in a year and tell you about the progress. You're welcome too, absolutely. Thank you very much. Let's open the floor for questions and answers. If I could see a show of hands. There is a gentleman here, we have a microphone. If you could identify yourself for the sake of our online audience as well, please. Thank you. Hello, Alexandre Cabaret from DevEx here. I have a question on the partners that you would like to convene around this partnership specifically, what type of organizations are you looking at partnering with? And how do you plan to replicate that maybe in other countries? Well, I can start and invite my colleagues to join in. This is a partnership between Novartis, the government, the Sickle Cell Foundation and the various medical societies. I think as we expand this partnership, as we hope to, to other countries in Africa, what's most important is the strong political will that we need to see. I think what was extraordinary here is that the president of Ghana himself had a commitment to this. The vice president is here and we're honored that he is here as well. And you can see that we have very high level and deep commitment to make the partnership a reality. The other element is, and perhaps Professor Koff could speak more about it, the Sickle Cell Foundation has been working on this problem in Ghana for a very long time, has nobly established the screening centers that are required to make this program a reality. So maybe Professor, you could say a few words about that. I think it's very important that a problem like this cannot be solved only by those of us who live with it. When we started the screening program in Ghana for newborns, I started with a research grant from the National Institutes of Health in the United States. And Ghana is not the only one now involved in newborn screening. We have a team of experts around Africa who are also learning how to do newborn screening. Unfortunately, just like Ghana, governments have not been able to fund newborn screening alone. And so in each of these countries, we are looking for partners such as Novartis and other companies to help with us. It's important that scientists who are also working in Sickle Cell Disease in other parts of the world look at Africa and engage us in some of the research work that they do because it is through those kinds of partnerships that we train people to do modern research and particularly to take advantage of some of the new medications and new treatments that are along the way. So it's a general partnership of companies, community-based organizations, governments, and research scientists around the world to solve this global problem. Thank you very much. We heard this week a lot about the importance of data in all types of field. And Director General, you mentioned the importance of data. Could you expand a little bit? How optimistic are you that the data will be available that you need to combat Sickle Cell Disease effectively? Thank you very much. We, through the National Newborn Screening Program, we've developed a database where Professor Ahini Frumpong did with some people in the US and we are going to build on this database so that you use up just mobile phones in the small clinics, get the patients guarded and especially the newborn babies where they are tested and they are put on database and they will follow them up. It's about, I think about 1.7% or 1.8% of the children who were tested in Ghana were all positive. So we follow them up through the treatment to adulthood. And luckily because we are introducing new treatment like hydroceurea and the new ones which will come which we hope that Ghana also will also get advantage of being used as the first country and then we get advantage of it, we will build up the data and then follow the children up to adulthood and we are hopeful that this data will be used for Sickle Cell Disease in the whole of South Saharan Africa. And we are also working together with the Research Institute, Noguchi Memorial Institute and then also with a quasi-center for collaborative research and then through Ghana Health Service and our research centers. We have three research centers in Ghana in the Northern part, the Middle Belt and the Southern Belt. So we all work together, collect the data, analyze the data and then use the data and also planning and policy. And then this is how we are going to use the data in the country. And then secondly, we are also digitalizing our health system. We are now going to eHealth almost from the chip center to the health center to the digital hospitals and then also to the teaching hospitals and the regional hospitals. So we are all going to be on digital health. And once we have the digital health, anybody who is tested and put on the data can be assessed anywhere the person goes. And more importantly, we are even going a bit further in digitalization by also using drones to also service the areas where they are very under-served areas and very hard to reach areas and also for emergency medicines. So these are all the things that we are putting together and data is very important in all these things. So we make very good use of data to make sure that it works and works well not only for a second cell but for the whole total health system. Thank you. Minister, you want to add to that, please? Data, data, data. As I speak, I want to tell you that for adults, we don't seem to have any data on who carries sickle and who doesn't because you have not been doing screening at very early stages. We only get to know our sickle cell status after complications setting and we begin to attend facilities. Then when the doctors suspect that you might be one, they test and you become positive and they put you on some medication. So this sort of engagement, the partnership we're now going to have with the VATIS and the Foundation will expand the activity of screening newborns and if you're able to cover the entire country, then we can lay hands on quality data to let us be able to tell what percentage of population are carrying this disease or not. So I believe one very significant thing that we will achieve with this type of engagement or partnership will be our data. That will be collected, detecting the disease in people at very early stages who give us adequate information on how we can allocate resources and money. This disease is better. Thank you, Minister. And let me follow up with a question to you directly and I'm sitting far away enough from Vaz to ask that question. So Novartis is, if I may say so, almost like a usual suspect because as you mentioned, Vaz, you've been in the field for 100 years and you're kind of an obvious choice to work in this partnership. But Minister, we heard from the panelists about data. We heard about mobile phones. We heard about other kind of technologies in use. Are you planning on involving partners outside the health industry and how would that help and what are the most immediate needs there? You can run any health system without partners. I always tell people, especially when I meet the media and they confront me with what is your priority, I find it difficult to mention just one area. We call health spans across several diseases, several systems, several stakeholders and you cannot just run efficient systems without partnerships. We have partnerships with several people. We have partnerships with organizations, multilateral, bilateral. And so partnerships are a way through which we can actually tackle and manage some of our diseases and our health issues that we have in our country. One of the things I think Ghana has is a vibrant entrepreneurial setting as well in the data and digital space. We've learned about this on our own through work we've done with startups in Ghana. So I believe we as industry and the global community needs to also support local entrepreneurs that are working on data science and digital, allow them to build new technologies to address some of these problems and I think that's a big opportunity. Thank you very much. Do we have any more questions from the floor? Yes, we have a follow up question from Devex here. Please, yes? Yeah, maybe just on the research bit because you've released a new drug recently, right? And is it the one that you'll be using in Ghana and where do you hope to get to the new research and what this drug will be impacting basically and how it can be cured? So sickle cell disease treatment has been I think not a great story for many decades. Actually hydroxyurea, the drug we talk about here was developed for other uses and became licensed for sickle cell disease in the late 1990s. So that's the medicine we start with. You can manage sickle cell disease very well with penicillin, cheaply available and low cost hydroxyurea at least in the younger ages. So that's where we start with this partnership then build up the capacity in the country. We recently received breakthrough therapy designation for a new medicine. It's not yet approved in the United States in Europe also for sickle cell disease which is a next generation therapy. Our plan now is to run a, we hope or look evaluating I should say running a clinical trial in Ghana to evaluate the use of this medicine in Ghana. And then this medicine could be put on top of the system and eventually the hope longer term as new technologies like gene therapy become available. Could one day if the Ghana system is strong enough then to then actually use a gene or cell therapy to potentially cure or at least dramatically reduce the burden of the disease longer term. But I think it starts with the foundations of screening of the basic care and then we go step by step. And that's why we look at this partnership as a decades long effort to tackle the disease. I don't know anything I got wrong, Professor. No, I think you're completely correct. If we don't have a strong scientist, basic scientist, clinical scientist, we cannot conduct clinical research. And if you're not able to organize a large patient load into clinical research that means you cannot even do clinical trials like drug trials. So many times sickle cell research is being done where the disease is not very common because where it is most common in sub-Saharan Africa systems, medical systems are not well developed for research. It's important that these drugs when they're being developed that we also contribute patients, experts and also learn how to do these things because where the problem is biggest, you would think that that's where the solutions should be first also tested and proven to work. Thank you, Professor. Mindful of the time and being a Swiss organization, we try to be on time. If there's any closing remarks now would be the time. Otherwise, I congratulate you for this new partnership. And as the forum, I thank you for announcing it here today on our platform. I think it's a shining example of how public sector, private sector, foundation and academia can work together. So thank you very much. Thank you very much for being here today and thank you for watching. Thank you. Thank you.