An ordinary childhood moment
For a child living with a rare disease - extraordinary.
This week I hosted Bonnie Anderson from Sanofi’s Rare Disease Humanitarian Program on my podcast - Life Sciences Today.
In a world full of AI slop, inflated claims, abstract promises and cynicism about pharma companies, I found Bonnie’s story inspiring.
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Running laps on a football field
A few days before our conversation, Bonnie Anderson received a video from El Salvador. It showed a three-and-a-half-year-old boy running laps on a football field—twice around, almost every day, because he wants to.
This week on Life Sciences Today, I had the privilege of speaking with Bonnie about Sanofi’s Rare Humanitarian Program, which has been quietly doing remarkable work for 35 years.
Since 1991, the program has treated more than 4,000 patients and today supports about 1,250 people in 70 countries who might otherwise have no access to treatment at all.
More than logistics, it’s about helping physicians find a path through diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring.
More than press releases, it’s about building local medical infrastructure, creating faster digital intake systems, protecting patient privacy, and navigating the kind of bureaucracy that would make many organizations give up.
Bonnie shoots for five business days on average, some cases are approved faster — even within hours — and she gave an example of a first Uganda case processed in 36 hours.
She spoke with conviction about what it means to keep patients at the center.
Not as a slogan, but as a daily operational challenge.
Like when she had people riding buses, carrying backpacks of drugs bringing drugs to rare-disease patients in Ukraine.
The craziest anti-pattern in treatment access
Her biggest anti-pattern was the growing difficulty of access to medicines even as global logistics and same-day delivery have become the norm.
Many countries make it harder to donate and ship drugs to rare-disease patients. It’s easier for government bureaucrats to raise regulatory, reimbursement, and bureaucratic barriers than to make it easy to live.
Sometimes “impact” is measured in big numbers, bold forecasts, and market size.
Sometimes impact is a little boy running because he can.
Listen to the podcast here
The last mile between invention and impact
If you want to create value, you have to deliver your product.
Even if it means using backpacks on buses from Moldavia to Ukraine.
Bonnie’s story is more than philanthropy.
It is execution.
Sanofi can discover a therapy.
Regulators can approve it.
Physicians can diagnose the patient.
None of that matters if the medicine never reaches the child.
Value is created when delivery happens.
That may sound obvious. In the US healthcare system, it isn’t.
Founders spend years on science, engineering, clinical evidence, and regulatory strategy.
But patients only benefit when products make it through reimbursement, procurement, workflow integration, hospital IT, clinician adoption, and commercialization.
The journey from invention to patient impact is longer than most teams realize.
A 30-minute call is cheap compared to investing 10 years of your life on a product the market can’t adopt.