Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited announced today the appointment of Dr Mahender Nayak as area head for the company’s ICMEA (India, CIS, Middle East, Turkey, and Africa) Area.

In the capacity, Dr Nayak will lead the company’s operations from Dubai, UAE, where he will be based.

Dr Nayak has more than 20 years of performance-driven leadership experience in the biopharmaceutical industry, having worked in multinational and regional companies. Before this role, he oversaw portfolio management for Takeda’s Growth and Emerging Markets Business Unit based in Singapore (2018 to 2020). Prior to that, Dr Nayak was the general manager of Takeda’s operations in Korea.

Dr Nayak said: “This is an exciting time to move to a part of the world that is teeming with great opportunities to increase patient access to Takeda’s highly innovative medicines. We aim to do this through our commercial activities and commitments around our approaches to access to medicines across rare diseases, oncology, neuroscience, and gastroenterology.”