• Former Vice President Middle East, Turkey, Africa and Pakistan (METAP) of Abbott Essam Abdelhadi has acquired a stake in Egypt-based life science startup Nawah Scientific and joined its advisory board, as part of the startup's Series A round.
• Nawah recently expanded to Jordan on the back of its $1 million Seed round raised earlier this year.
• Founded in 2015 by  Omar Sakr, Nawah is the first Mena-based company to issue certified reference materials (CRMs).
• It has also expanded its offerings to pharmaceutical companies to include formulation development, stability studies, as well as all raw material and finished products quality control checks.

Press release

Nawah Scientific, Egypt’s fastest-growing life science venture, has announced today that Dr. Essam Abdelhadi, Ex-Abbott VP Middle East, Turkey, Africa and Pakistan has acquired a stake at Nawah and joined the advisory board. This comes as Nawah gets closer to closing a significant Series A round led and joined by regional and international investors.

“It’s such an honor” Dr. Omar Sakr, Nawah’s founder and CEO commented. He added “Dr. Abdelhadi has been always a role model to look up to. He comes with immense experience in pharmaceutical industry, sales and marketing across the same geographical markets Nawah plans to expand to, in addition to deep hands-on expertise in managing operations at such scale. We could not wish for a better investor and advisor to help us manage our current rapid growth”.

Dr. Abdelhadi led a very interesting career with top leadership positions in several multinational pharmaceutical companies such as Janssen Cilag, Johnson & Johnson, Abbott Pharma and Abbott nutrition. He commented on this investment “I was impressed by the development Nawah has achieved in a relatively short time, in an untypical environment. One won’t expect this level of scientific quality to emerge in the region and I have full confidence that Nawah will grow upwards and onwards to compete in the international scientific services market”.

With a clear mission to “Empower Science in MENA & Africa”, Nawah has introduced a brand-new business model to the region, bringing the power of the digital era to the capable hands of scientists. “Scientists' role is to think, design the experiments, and interpret results, we do the rest of technical work for them at Nawah” commented Prof. Ali El-Halawany, Chief Scientific Officer at Nawah. Here is how it works: Nawah's online platform receives experiments requests online, a courier collects samples for analysis, Nawah's scientists carry needed tests and return results online. By this, Nawah enables scientists to do higher-quality research regardless of their location and owned lab facilities.

Nawah has expanded its offerings for pharmaceutical companies to include pharmaceutical formulation development, stability studies, as well as all types of raw material and finished products quality control checks. Yet, even more importantly, Nawah is the first MENA based company to produce certified reference materials (CRMs) that are much needed by the industry