Mina Bakheet: Turning medical research into reality

CAIRO – 10 November 2017: One of the most promising Egyptian entrepreneurs who believes in the possibility of reducing the gap between scientific research and practical innovations that benefit everyone is Dr. Mina Elisha Bakheet.

Bakheet, who was honored by President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi during the last day of the World Youth Forum (WYF), is the founder and chairman of the Panasia Group of Scientific Innovation and Investment in the United Kingdom.

Bakheet is also a lecturer and researcher at the Department of Oncology at the University of Oxford.

In 2017, Bakheet was selected by Forbes magazine to be featured on the “30 Under 30 in Europe: Health and Science” list. In a short interview on July 2017, Bakheet said that his main goal in the beginning was to find a way to use all of his academic research in real medical innovations so that everyone, especially patients, can benefit from them.

“I noticed that all researches turned eventually to be just words and papers, I wanted to turn them to something real,” he said.

Bakheet added that later on he started about 56 companies in different fields from manufacturing medicines to working on finding vaccines for diseases like Alzheimer’s, cancer, Zika and Ebola.

According to his statements, Bakheet’s coming step is to develop the pharmaceutical industry in Egypt, and to create new job opportunities for youth.

The WYF, which launched on Sunday under the theme “We Need to Talk”, is a forum designed to give global youth the chance to be heard by world leaders and influential individuals. The event brought 3,000 youth together from all over the world.

The idea to hold an international youth conference in Egypt came during the third National Conference of Youth (NCY) in Ismailia.

The forum included 46 sessions and workshops that discussed various key issues, including youth employment to achieve sustainable development, as well as fighting terrorism, extremism, and illegal immigration.