Inside the lab at Nawah Scientific
CEO
EMBA
Class of 2018
Cairo, Egypt
nawah-scientific.com
Your skillset can transform your career trajectory. But can it change the course
of an industry across whole countries? Result: affirmative. Combining the
hard skills of his PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences with lessons learned from
his EMBA, Egyptian national Omar Sakr is making huge strides in putting
the Middle East on the scientific research map.
Omar Sakr
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Adapting Skills
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has
long been lacking in scientific innovation; some sources
cite the impact of widespread political turmoil in recent
years. It has made for a difficult gap for graduates in the
field. “Many of my fellow scientists wanted to return
home after their studies,” says Omar, “but were unable
to due to the lack of cutting-edge research facilities.”
For years, Omar explains, research remained captive
in poorly equipped labs and seldom outsourced to
Europe, leading to low-quality results. He decided it
was time to step in. Today his company, Nawah Scientific,
makes innovation accessible to those in and around
Egypt through its high-quality, online research labora-
tory service.
The process is simple. Any scientist can go to Nawah
Scientific’s website, choose the test they want to perform,
and fill out an online questionnaire. A courier then col-
lects the sample from the client. Nawah’s team carries
out the analysis and then posts the results in their online
portal. “It’s like a shopping experience. And it works like
magic.” Alternatively, scientists can choose to rent the
equipment and carry out the research themselves.
But even achieving buy-in came with cultural chal-
lenges. “We were initially refused seed capital because
investors simply didn’t believe science could flourish in
the Middle East,” explains Omar. He quickly proved
the skeptics wrong and within a few years had analyzed
close to 30,000 samples across nine countries, including
for 32 universities. They will soon open new hubs in the
Gulf area and North Africa, bolstered by a recent award
of $150,000 as second-place winner in Jack Ma’s inau-
gural African Netpreneur Prize, putting the MENA re-
gion firmly on the map for biotech and life science inno-
vation. Says Omar, “We’ll be running another round of
investment next year. The business is really running
well; we’re almost tripling revenues year-on-year and
expecting to raise ~$5M by mid-2020.”
What’s a memorable experiment his team has
worked on? “A recent project involved a very high-tech,
cutting-edge development as a treatment for liver cir-
rhosis. I can’t say too much about it at this stage, but it’s
potentially groundbreaking—so watch this space.” And
this sums up the endgame for Omar: “If the region has
high-tech research at its fingertips, then science will be-
come transformed into products. We can create trans-
formative ecosystems and push them to market through
scientific research.”
Adapting Skills
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