IN FOCUS: THR

Tuesday 25 April 2023

IN FOCUS

Free | Online | Half-Day | Every Year

Welcome to GTNF’s IN FOCUS Series, our free to register online half-day conference which takes place every spring.

IN FOCUS explores the big issues, but in more depth.

Launched in 2021, the IN FOCUS series has already trained its lens on THR and on Sustainability.

In 2023, tobacco harm reduction is once again in the spotlight. The WHO is preparing to host its COP 10 for the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in Panama this November. As a result, our outstanding line-up of public health professionals, industry and policy experts, and thought leaders will be sharing their latest ideas and insights on this ever-evolving topic.

At a time when the global regulatory environment remains mixed, and the sustainability of reduced-risk products are under the microscope, we have brought together thought leaders and commentators from across the world to give us their views and debate the way ahead.

So join us on Tuesday 25 April 2023 for IN FOCUS: THR. 

*Before you register for IN FOCUS: THR, please take a moment to read our terms and conditions, including our privacy policy and refund policy. Thank you.

SPEAKERS

Keynote Speakers

Mary Glindon MP

Member of Parliament for North Tyneside and Vice-Chair of the APPG for Vaping

  • Mary Glindon MP has been the Labour MP for North Tyneside since her election in 2010. Prior to this, Mary was elected to North Tyneside Council and served as both Deputy Mayor and Mayor.

    Mary has sat on various committees, including EFRA, Transport, Communities and Local Government, and is currently the Vice-Chair of the APPG for Vaping and is also an Opposition Whip.

    Her political interests are employment, health, housing, the environment and older people’s issues.

Delon Human

President of Health Diplomats

  • Delon Human is the president of Health Diplomats, a global health consulting group specializing in strategy, access to healthcare and harm reduction.

    Previously, Human served as the secretary-general and CEO of the World Medical Association, secretary-general of the International Food and Beverage Alliance, secretary-general of the African Medical Association, secretary-general of the African Harm Reduction Alliance and adviser to the World Health Organization director-general and the U.N. secretary-general.

    Human is a published author, international lecturer and healthcare consultant. Human has become a vocal advocate for a change in public health thinking from the abstinence-only approach to a more pragmatic and expanded use of smoke-free nicotine-delivery systems as a substitute or cessation tool for smoking. He authored the book Wise Nicotine.

    Human holds qualifications in medicine, child health and business studies.

Patricia Kovacevic - MC

Global Legal and Regulatory Strategist and Principal of RegulationStrategy.com

  • An experienced legal, regulatory and compliance leader and harm reduction thought leader, Patricia Kovacevic’s career comprises leading senior legal and regulatory positions with Food and Drug Administration-regulated multinationals, including Philip Morris International and Lorillard, as well as partner roles with premier global law firms. At present, she is general counsel and head of external affairs for Cryomass Technologies Inc., a U.S. listed company providing adjacent services to the cannabis industry, which has recently acquired patented technology (the CryoMass Refinement System) to fully separate trichomes from biomass.

    Her expertise includes senior management roles and leading multinational, cross-disciplinary teams, with focus on corporate law, FDA and EU regulatory, compliance, M&A, U.S. and global food, drug, nicotine and consumer goods regulation, cannabis/CBD regulation, external affairs and the legal framework applicable to marketing, media communications, investigations, FCPA, trade sanctions, privacy, intellectual property, product development and launch. She also led cross-disciplinary teams engaged in scientific research efforts.

    Kovacevic served on various trade association bodies and conference advisory boards. She authored several articles on nicotine regulation, co-authored an academic treatise, “The Regulation of E-Cigarettes,” as well as various other papers and is often invited as a keynote speaker or panelist before global conferences and government agency public hearings.

    Kovacevic is an attorney admitted to practice in New York, before the U.S. Tax Court, before the U.S. Court of International Trade and before the Supreme Court of the United States. She holds a Juris Doctor (doctor of law) degree from Columbia Law School in New York and completed the Harvard Business School “Corporate Leader” executive education program. Kovacevic speaks several languages fluently, including French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian and Croatian.

Jeremy Lim

CEO and Co-Founder of AMiLi

  • Associate Professor Jeremy Lim is director for global health at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at the National University of Singapore and leads the initiatives in health systems strengthening and universal health coverage. He brings diverse and unique perspectives, having spent substantial time in public and private healthcare across Asia as well as in policy advisory with Singapore’s Ministry of Health, the World Bank and the World Health Organization. Outside academia, Lim serves on the boards of various for-profit and not-for-profit organizations in different aspects of healthcare, including migrant worker health, end of life care and digital health interventions. He trained in surgery and public health, attaining post-graduate qualifications in both from the U.K. and U.S.

James Murphy

Director of Research and Science at BAT

  • Dr. James Murphy was appointed Management Board Director, Research & Science on 01 March 2023.

    James joined the BAT Group in 2005 and throughout his career has held a variety of roles in R&D, Scientific & Regulatory Affairs, Marketing Futures, Nicoventures and in the Americas and SubSaharan Africa region.

    Prior to his current role, James was the Executive Vice President for R&D and Scientific Regulatory Affairs within the Reynolds American group, having previously served as the BAT Group’s Head of Potentially Reduced Risk Product (PRRP) Science until 31 November 2020. James also served as the product development lead for the first Vype vapor launches in 2013/14. As the BAT Group’s Head of Reduced Risk Substantiation, James created and published the BAT Group’s multi-disciplinary scientific assessment of glo, Vype, Vuse and Velo to access their relative risk profiles.

    James has been one of the lead representatives for the BAT Group’s global science engagement with the media, regulators and the external scientific community.

Full professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Catania and Founder of the Center of Excellence for the Acceleration of Harm Reduction

Riccardo Polosa

  • Riccardo Polosa is the founder of the Center of Excellence for the Acceleration of Harm Reduction at the University of Catania. A full professor of internal medicine at the University of Catania with a specialist role as a respiratory physician, clinical immunologist, allergist and rheumatologist, Polosa is the founder of the Institute of Internal and Emergency Medicine at the main teaching hospital of the University of Catania, where he coordinates a large staff of senior physicians, young residents, nurses and administrative clerks.

    He is also the founder of the Center for Tobacco Research at the University of Catania, where contracted research staff conduct high-profile clinical and behavioral research.

    The focus of his academic research has been historically centered upon the investigation of mechanisms of inflammation, biomarkers of disease activity, and novel drug target discovery in the area of respiratory medicine (asthma, COPD, rhinitis) and clinical immunology (allergic and autoimmune diseases). This has culminated with the participation of his research group in large EU-funded Pan-European research consortia.

    Nonetheless, over the last 15 years, his main research interest has progressively shifted in the area of tobacco-related diseases, smoking prevention and cessation, tobacco harm reduction and e-vapor products. More specifically, he has been involved in the behavioral, clinical, physiological and toxicological evaluation of e-cigarettes for over 10 years. Principal Investigator of the first randomised control trial in the world about effectiveness and tolerability of e-cigarettes (the ECLAT study), he is the most prolific author in the field of e-cigarettes, according to recent bibliometric research. He designed and conducted dozens of research studies, working with smoking cessation specialists, clinical psychologists, experienced vapers, epidemiologists, biostatisticians, chemists, toxicologists and biologists from all over the world.

    He is a member of the Scientific Committee of the LIAF (Italian Anti-Smoking League) and serves as an external member of the Italian Institute of Health Technical Committee on monitoring electronic cigarettes. Already national coordinator for the Italian Working Group on electronic cigarettes and e-liquids, he has been elected convenor for the Italian Working Group on requirements and test methods for emissions of electronic cigarettes within the European Committee for Standardization (CEN/TC 437).

  • Founder and president of the Global Tobacco and Nicotine Forum (GTNF), which launched in 2008, Elise Rasmussen is also the executive director of the GTNF Trust. The Trust was established in 2019 and embodies the influential Vapor Voice and Tobacco Reporter magazines as well as the GTNF. Rasmussen is co-founder and chairwoman of Women in Tobacco, an association for women working for or connected with the tobacco and nicotine industries. She is Master Elect of the Worshipful Company of Tobacco Pipe Makers and Tobacco Blenders, one of the City of London’s historic livery companies—marking the second time a woman has held the position of warden of the company. Rasmussen was given the Freedom of the City of London award in 2013. In 2017, she received a Voices of Freedom award from Forest, a prominent U.K.-based organization campaigning for adult nicotine consumer rights.

GTNF Founder and GTNF Trust Executive Director

Elise Rasmussen

Derek Yach

Global Health Advocate

  • Derek Yach is currently a global health consultant. He was the president and founder of the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World. Throughout his career, he has led smoking cessation and harm reduction research and policy development. He is a passionate advocate of health promotion and disease prevention and advances private-public partnerships and technology innovation as the means to accelerate progress in global health.

    Yach is a former World Health Organization cabinet director and executive director for noncommunicable diseases and mental health where he led development of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. He is also the former chief health officer of the Vitality Group, former senior vice president of global health and agriculture policy at PepsiCo, former director of global health at the Rockefeller Foundation and a former professor of global health at Yale University. He has authored or co-authored more than 250 peer-reviewed articles on global health and has served on several advisory boards, including the World Economic Forum, Cornerstone Capital and the Wellcome Trust. From 2007 to 2016, he served on the program advisory committee of the Clinton Global Initiative. He currently serves on the APCO International Advisory Group and as consultant/adviser to several biotech companies and to the U.K.’s Our Future Health.

    Yach is a native of South Africa and has an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Georgetown University, a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery degree from the University of Cape Town, a Bachelor of Science (Hons Epi) degree from the University of Stellenbosch and a Master of Public Health degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is an enthusiastic and daily open water swimmer.

Panelists

Senior Vice President, Grants Management and Health and Science Strategy, Foundation for a Smoke-Free World

Ehsan Latif

  • Ehsan Latif oversees the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World’s global grants program, including management of the entire grant submission and fulfillment process. In this role, he is also responsible for providing resources to researchers and related stakeholders in support of the foundation’s three pillars of work: Health and Science Research, Agriculture and Livelihoods and Industry Transformation.

    Latif has more than 20 years of experience managing the development and implementation of cohesive strategies to achieve public health gains by linking global health priorities to the needs on the ground. Previously, he served as senior adviser for noncommunicable diseases and director of tobacco control at the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, managing global teams across India, China, Singapore, Mexico, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Vietnam, Pakistan, Brazil and Chad. His work entailed providing leadership for planning, organizing and prioritizing focused interventions for tobacco control to ensure delivery of strategic goals through collaboration.

    In his early career, he was responsible for the development of the National Health Policy for Pakistan and served as a main contributor of the noncommunicable diseases debate in the early 2000s. His work has since involved capacity building and provision of grants to governments, civil society organizations, universities and researchers. He recently led and managed a US$10M program to support policy development for tobacco control in low-income and middle-income countries faced with the highest burden of disease caused by tobacco use.

    Latif has served on the boards of several public health entities, including the Framework Convention Alliance and the Non-Communicable Disease Alliance. He was also a member of various international groups working on lung health and tobacco control set up under the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control Secretariat and the World Health Organization.

    Latif is originally from Pakistan and now resides in Scotland. He holds a doctorate in medicine from Punjab Medical College and a master’s degree in public health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Professor in the Faculty of Dental Medicine at Titu Maiorescu University (Bucharest)

Mihaela Raescu

  • Mihaela Raescu has a doctorate in medical sciences, dentistry, and has taught oral and dental prevention at the Titu Maiorescu University School of Dentistry in Bucharest, Romania, since 2003. Raescu has been a tenured university professor since 2015 in addition to being an active practitioner and primarius doctor. She is also the Erasmus coordinator and the president of the Ethical Committee at the university.

    Raescu graduated from the University of Craiova’s School of Dentistry in 1995 and received postgraduate scholarships at the University of Birmingham (U.K.) and the University Claude Bernard Lyon II (France).

    Raescu has authored and co-authored numerous studies and publications and has been a guest speaker at various professional conferences.

    She conducted several research projects in the dentistry field and products development as a project manager (European projects and private lab projects).

    In 2018, she received a KAC Foundation scholarship regarding research in the field of tobacco harm reduction. She also participated at SRNT Munich 2018 and in Bucharest at the Conference Impact Industry Innovations for Economy and Society in the presence of governmental representatives.

    She is fluent in French, English, Italian and conversational Russian in addition to her native Romanian.

  • Mohamadi Sarkar leads a team of scientists within regulatory affairs at Altria that provides strategic direction toward developing the science and evidence for regulatory submissions for noncombustible tobacco products for Altria’s tobacco operating companies. Before being appointed to his current position, Sarkar served as the director of clinical research. In that role, he enabled responsible product development and tobacco harm reduction by generating evidence from clinical studies.

    Before joining Altria, Sarkar held a variety of positions at West Virginia University (WVU), including associate professor of clinical pharmacology, associate professor of genetics and developmental biology and associate professor of the Tobacco Research Center at the WVU Cancer Institute. Sarkar continued to teach at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he still holds an affiliate appointment teaching clinical pharmacology. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine.

    During his academic career, Sarkar worked on research related to smoking and health funded by the National Cancer Institute. He has authored more than 100 scientific peer-reviewed publications and presentations at scientific meetings. Sarkar has also participated in multiple seminar presentations and authored a variety of scientific book chapters related to his areas of expertise.

Scientific Strategy & Analysis, Regulatory Affairs at Altria Client Services (ALCS)

Mohamadi Sarkar

Social Scientist and Professor of Social Scientific Addiction Research at the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences in Germany, Faculty of Health and Social Work

Heino Stöver

  • Heino Stöver is a social scientist and professor of social scientific addiction research at the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences in Germany, Faculty of Health and Social Work. Since 1987, he has been director of the Archive and Documentation Centre for Drug Literature and Research at the University of Bremen (www.archido.info). He is the president of the national umbrella organization working on harm reduction for drug users, called akzept e.V. (Bundesverband fur akzeptierende Drogenarbeit und humane Drogenpolitik; www.akzept.eu). Since 2009, he has been the director of the Institute of Addiction Research (frankfurt-university.de/isff).

    Stöver’s main fields of research and project development expertise are health promotion for vulnerable and marginalized groups, drug services, prison healthcare and related health issues (especially HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C, drug dependence and gender issues) and the potential of e-cigarettes. His international research and consultancy expertise include working as a consultant for the European Commission, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the World Health Organization, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Open Society Institute in various contexts.

    He has published several articles in peer-reviewed international journals and books on preventing and treating infectious diseases adequately, opioid substitution programs (including the provision of heroin) in the community and in prisons and general healthcare issues. He is the co-founder of the International Journal of Prisoner Health (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Heino_Stoever).

    Stöver has gained project experiences by participating in and leading several projects in the European Union, Africa, Central Asia and Asia

Social and Behavioral Scientist and Owner of Applied Research and Analysis Consulting

Jessica Zdinak

  • Zdinak holds a doctorate in social psychology and a doctoral specialization in statistics. She has led research teams since 2005 supporting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation and other large-scale grants and projects. She has served as a social scientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and later as a director of applied research and evaluation at a management consulting firm in Maryland. In these capacities, she helped to design research program evaluations, with her most memorable efforts leading a team of researchers and physicians to develop an intimate partner violence/domestic violence prevention and response e-learning curriculum. This was one of the only programs of its kind in the United States at that time, training over 7,000 healthcare providers to assess for and respond to domestic and sexual violence in over 80 clinical settings. Zdinak is passionate about developing this type of program related to nicotine and tobacco products.

    Following her public health experience, Zdinak spent six years at Altria, where she designed, led and reported on perception and behavior studies for various premarket tobacco product applications (PMTAs). She also spent time leading product research focused on innovation and future harm reduction opportunities. She now serves as chief research officer and owner of Applied Research and Analysis Company (ARAC), where she leads a team of doctorate-level and master-level behavioral scientists in conducting quantitative and qualitative research. This team specializes in TPPI studies, human factors and label comprehension research, and actual use and longitudinal experimental switching studies. The ARAC team understands that in this regulatory environment, outside researchers must be strategic thinkers and partners in the product innovation, PMTA and modified-risk tobacco product application process.

AGENDA

All times in EDT (US Eastern Daylight Time)

08:00

Welcome / Introductions: Elise Rasmussen and Patricia Kovacevic

08:05

Opening Keynote: James Murphy

08:20

Keynote: Riccardo Polosa

08:30

Keynote: Delon Human

08:45

Panel: Using the FCTC to accelerate tobacco harm reduction

Moderator: Delon Human

  • Ehsan Latif and Mihaela Raescu

Q&A with Delon Human and Heino Stöver

10:25

Coffee Break

10:45

Keynote: Mary Glindon MP

11:05

Keynote: Derek Yach

11:15

Panel: Drawing on behavioral and consumer insights to encourage harm reduction

Moderator: Derek Yach

  • Mohamadi Sarkar and Jessica Zdinak

12:25

Closing Keynote: Jeremy Lim

12:45

Closing Remarks: Elise Rasmussen

SPONSORS

General Inquiries

For any additional information about IN FOCUS: THR please contact Elise Rasmussen:

elise@gtnf.org / +44 7775 645048

CONTACT

Media Inquiries

For any additional media requests about IN FOCUS: THR please contact:

david@davidroach.co.uk / +44 7757 719948

tommy@davidroach.co.uk / +44 7388 110679

ronan@davidroach.co.uk / +44 7946 689351