Medical Tender &
Business Talk

Anouar is Regional Market Access & Government Affairs Director for AbbVie Biopharmaceutical
for the Middle East & Africa Region. He has joined AbbVie in January 2014.
Anouar began his career in 2001 as Medical Representative then progressed through positions
of increasing responsibility in Sales, Marketing, Market Access and General Management in
Schering Plough, Novo Nordisk and MSD at affiliate and region levels before joining Abbvie as
Regional Market Access Director, Middle East & Africa.
Anouar carries a Medical Diploma from Faculty of Medicine of Tunis, Executive Business Studies
Diploma (MBA-like) from ALBA business school (Greece) and European Market Access Diploma
from University of Lyon (France).
Acting as leader of PhRMA MEA “Value & Pricing” working group & “Tendering & Contracting”
workstream and member of PhRMA MEA “IP” & Oncology” working groups.

Asmaa Khalil is manager of MENA RA at Boston Biopharma. She has more than 15 years’ experience in global regulatory affairs “MENA Region, African Countries, CIS Region, APAC region & EU region”. Asmaa is expert consultant in CTD, NeeS & eCTD compilation and submission/publishing of dossier. She was the speaker of more than 30 workshops in Egypt & GCC for regulatory affairs and CTD/eCTD sessions. Asmaa has global network contacts with agents and support pharmaceutical companies to start building new export business worldwide. Asmaa earned her B.S. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from Cairo University, and her M.Sc. in Biochemistry

Bashar Kayali is a Pharmacist with MBA Degree with more than 18 years in the Pharmaceutical & Healthcare business. He has experienced different roles throughout the industry from Brand Manager at Roche to sales manager in Sandoz.

Currently he is the tenders & market access manager in Octapharma, a Swiss Multinational manufacturer, for blood & plasma products to supply hemophilia patients with novel medicines.

Dr. Abdalla Abotalleb is one of the most profound experts in healthcare policy and regulations in the Middle East. His expertise extends from HTA & Reimbursement policies to regulatory and supply chain strategies in the public sector. He has been involved in the fields of health economics, outcomes research, and reimbursement policy within the healthcare industry for 15 years, with experience across the pharmaceutical, biologicals and vaccines. And now works for WHO as a project manager at health care reforming area. Abdalla Abotaleb graduated in faculty of pharmacy then obtained a post-graduate in health economics followed by a PhD in Health Economics & Policy form York University. He also has a degree in Project management professional (PMP), Pharm. D certificate and a Master of business administration (MBA). He, in addition to being a committee member and project manager in several national projects in many countries including Germany. United Kingdom, Egypt, Algeria, Sudan, Russia, and Poland, He is a very active researcher with tens of publication across different well recognized organizing including ISPOR, ESMO, ASCO, ECCO, iHEA. HTAI, and EAHE. He has been a true contributor to several public and industrial projects in Egypt, his homeland. He committedly changed the landscape of the healthcare policy there. A few examples to mention are his contributions to the establishment of the NORCB (national organization for control and research of biologics), Egyptian Biosimilars guidelines the cancer and MS registry. Establishing stroke units, hospital based HTA and Health economic unit at ministry of health in Egypt’s different sectors. Multiple engagement efforts are well recognized in his research through introducing concepts of stakeholder engagement. He also does that by being an active member of many research organizations internationally and locally like the ISPOR. Abdalla Abotalleb remains a very rich source of developmental initiatives having been hands on expert across different sectors of the healthcare systems and a visionary for healthcare reform.

Mohamed Amin has more than 25 years of experience in various fields of the pharmaceutical industry, including Sales, Market Access, patient Support, Tender & supply chain work almost with all therapeutic areas specially oncology  Holding Health Economic Diploma.

Holding health economic certificate from World bank received several awards and recognitions at both local and above-market levels in market access.

He has many publications in ISPOR Europe conference, and in some international magazines concerned with health economics managed many tenders, and facilitate patient accessibility to innovative medicine

He is a Director of Purchasing and Contracts Department (Supervision of tenders & involve in finalizing & tenders committee) in EHS Emirates Health Services. He has an experience in Auditing & giving Lectures

With a PhD. in Banking Transactions from 10 years and Master in Executive Master of Business Administration (EMBA) from Sharjah University

He has some Professional Certificates & Training like: Leadership, Innovation, and strategy, GE Company. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Franklin Covey – Middle East. Mini MBA for Supply Chain Professionals, Purchasing & Procurement Center. Mini MBA for Procurement Professionals, Purchasing & Procurement Center

Trained workshops in some related fields such as: Financial Transactions, Contracts for Financing and Financing applications in Banks, Government Accountancy for Non-Accountants.. etc

Dr. Sherif Hammad is a self-motivated, value driven professional that started his own Tender and Market Access Consultancy for local and International clients in the UAE.

He has expertise in market access, tender management, sales, marketing, field sales management and in both strategic and operational pricing.

With extensive years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry, his career journey included several Global organizations working on different therapeutic areas.

Dr. Sherif has a Bachelor of Science (B. Sc. Vet. Medicine) from Cairo University, Professional Diploma in Marketing from the Chartered Institute of marketing, UK,  received his: Specialized certificate of pharmaceutical marketing research in 2012, a “Pricing Strategy Optimization Specialization Certificate” from the University of Virginia, USA and Health Technology Assessment Fellowship at HTA office & Wifor institute in Germany. To top this he is a certified as a trainer in his field.

Dedicated Data Analyst and Data Scientist. Specialized in predictive algorithms for tendering in the pharmaceutical industry. Author and speaker.

Dr. Feras Al Tarifi earned his BSC. Pharmacy at the University of Jordan in 1997 and Pharmacy Practice & Clinical Pharmacy at Creighton University – Nebraska, USA and have honed is career ever since building his professional community through being on Comities and Boards and working for top International Pharmaceutical Companies.

He started in Abbot EPD /Solvay Pharmaceuticals as a Medical Rep and quickly climbed the ranks to Marketing Manager before he moved over to Hikma Pharmaceuticals as Brand Manager in RA and Tender Management and Business Intelligence. He advanced to Hangzhou Huisheng Biotech Pharm, then PIZHOU FUTONG BIOCHEMICALS and now he is the Central Tender and Strategic Business Development Director of Al Taqaddom Pharmaceutical Industries (TQ Pharma)

He serves on the Faculty of Pharmacy Board – Yarmouk University (Governmental) since 2020 and is a member of the Faculty of Pharmacy Alumni Committee – The University of Jordan and has received several recognized achievements by the Faculty of Pharmacy – Jordan University of Science & Technology (Governmental), The Jordanian Hashemite Fund for Human Development – JoHUD (headed by HH Princess Basma Bint Talal), Scientific Committee of JPA – Central, Zarqa, Irbid Governate JPA and the Belgian Embassy as being part of the best Belgian company working in Jordan for 2005 with Abbott.

He is a father or 3 busy boys Sanad, Basel & Saif.

Feras Boursan is the business development manager for Boston Biopharma, a pharmaceutical company focused on development and
manufacturing Oncology products. In this role I lead the company’s B2B efforts and find out a new opportunities.

Experience
Boston Biopharma
Director Of Business Development
January 2013 – Present (8 years 6 months)
EMEA
Responsible for :
-In/Out-Licensing
-Joint Venture
-New Products
ASIA Pharmaceutical
Product Marketing Manager
February 2011 – 2013 (2 years)
Pharmacode
International Business
2011 – 2012 (1 year)
HZM Pharma
Group Product Manager
2005 – 2010 (5 years)
GAIA PHARMA
Export Business development
2003 – 2005 (2 years)
Pharmacode
Export Manage

Firas Al Shawish, Pharmacist with more than 20 years’ experience in pharmaceutical field, an enthusiastic and a dedicated business manager with an experience and a diversify experience in pharmaceutical industry in managing commercial sales and marketing as well as logistics and order handling.

In 2000 earned my B.Sc. degree in Pharmacy from Applied Science University (faculty of pharmacy) and in 2010 made my MBA degree from Amman Arab University for Graduate studies.

My footpath started as a medical representative presenting medicines to different HCP and escalate in my career path to become Regional Tender Manager for one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world “MSD”.

“The key to success is to focus on goals, not obstacles.”

José Luis is passionate about applying state of the art artificial intelligence technology to improve healthcare and pharma processes. From EHR analysis to identify relevant records by labeling diseases, treatments, diagnosis and so on; to pricing analytics for drugs. Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, semantic technology, deep learning, cognitive computing, machine learning, clustering, classification, Big data, … a lot of technologies to uncover insights from structured and unstructured data.

José Luis holds a PhD in Telecommunications at the Technical University of Madrid, and an Executive MBA from the IE Business School.

Lora Fleifel is the Regional market access and pricing director for Middle East, Africa, Turkey and Russia at Merck Healthcare.

On top of her experience in pharmaceutical sales & project management roles, Lora has a decade of extensive market access and pricing expertise at Sanofi and Merck, on local, regional, and global assignment levels across multiple complex healthcare markets.

She is a licensed pharm D pharmacist,  with a masters’ degree in health economics and pharmacoeconomics to hone her market access understanding at a time when this was still a relatively undeveloped function in the region, convinced of the value this role could bring to her personal aspiration of improving health and medical services in the region.

As a universal citizen with a multicultural Lebanese, Belgian nationality, and a believer in the power of “As one for Patients”, she aspires to bring Europe and Middle East closer together in terms of culture, and healthcare standards.

Maya Chehayeb works in pharmaceutical industry for more than 18 years where she gained a wide experience by assuming different roles.

She currently holds the position of Commercial Excellence Lead at Biologix Fzco responsible to ensure operational excellence for the overall company portfolio in Middle East & North Africa. She is managing sales & operations planning in terms of demand planning, tender management, financial performance assessment and reconciliations with local distributors. She also oversees sales & marketing effectiveness of the company.

Maya started her career in 2003 as Medical Representative in sales department of Algorithm SAL and then was promoted to Senior Brand Manager & Senior Group Brand Manager heading Marketing for wide range of products. She then moved as Human Health Support Lead to manage customer operations, multichannel communications including events management, promotion & advertising as well as digital marketing implementation.

She succeeded in developing a set of processes & templates at different levels to optimize cross-functional integration. She is also a certified internal trainer and she worked hard through her career to prepare many workshops to support the company in building skills for many colleagues.

She has a Master in Biochemistry from Lebanese University- Faculty of Sciences. She is also talented is painting and enjoys cooking.

Dr. Mazen Abdul Majid is currently leading Market Access operations at Hikma pharmaceuticals in UAE

Mazen brings a mix of different senior roles through his 17 years of pharmaceuticals business experience within Tender business, Sales and Brand management at Multinational companies.

Certified as Doctor in dental surgery and currently running an MBA program from Abu Dhabi university

Head of regulatory affairs in Batterjee Pharma, Batterjee Pharma is a local Saudi pharmaceuticals and cosmoceuticals manufacturer, Mohamed is managing regulatory submissions in Saudi Arabia, GCC market and exports business development.

Mohamed is also interested in corporate strategies and people empowerment.

Nico is the founder of Growpal, a Switzerland-based consulting company and healthcare ecosystem builder. As  the former global Tender & Contracting Lead of Pfizer, he is one of the few people who have built up and lead a tender & contracting organization for a global pharmaceutical company. He has a unique know-how and experience in tender & contracting capabilities, processes, policies, teams & tools.

A Strategic commercial leader with an experience more than 15 years in multiple commercial functions across several regions, from Medical Rep in 2004, Trade and Tender, CNS Commercial Manager – Gulf, Brand Category Manager, DERMA – Gulf, Global Market Access Manager – UK to becoming the Business Effectiveness and Operations Manager – UAE.

Rania serves as Lead in the Women Leadership Initiative and holds an MBA from SBS Swiss Business School and a Degree in Pharmacy from Jâmi’at Bâyrut Al-Arabiya, Lebanon.

Sheryl Sidharth Dhas is an experienced tender professional having 12years experience in the Middle East Healthcare sector after handling tenders in the oil & gas arena for 5 years.

She has held positions of increasing responsibility during her stints with different companies and has formulated the standards and guidelines for their participation in tenders. She has helped evaluate and design tools to enable the determination of optimum offer prices and the tracking of tender performance from submission to delivery.

She is a skilled project manager and is goal-oriented, proactive and optimistic by nature.

Sheryl has a Bachelor’s in Management Studies and Master’s in Business Administration with a specialization in Marketing.

Sumaya is a pharmacist who is passionate in helping the growth of pharmaceutical industry in her home country, Iraq.

Driven by her ambition in delivering the most innovative products to the Iraqi patients, she always put the right plan for pharmaceutical companies, to secure the access and availability of their drugs. With a bachelor’s degree in Pharmacy and over 13 years of experience in the pharmaceuticals field, Sumaya has mastered an outstanding skill in dealing with MoH tenders, Sales, Marketing, Market Research, Competitive Intelligence, and Market Access.

When she is not working, you will find Sumaya swaying to the tunes of Salsa music, cooking Iraqi food, or just chilling with her friends and watching Netflix.