About Me

Public service foundation

After qualifying from Kasturba Medical College in 1982, I joined the Malaysian Ministry of Health. I served as Medical Officer and Acting Hospital Administrator of a 350-bed district hospital in Kuala Pilah, responsible for day-to-day operations, budget, and a staff of more than 320 including over 20 doctors and specialists. In 1988 I was awarded the Distinguished Civil Service Award — Gold for Negeri Sembilan Health Services. I moved from there to District Health Officer for the same district, overseeing maternal and child health, communicable and non-communicable disease control, environmental and occupational health, food sanitation, and water quality, with more than 100 staff including six Medical Officers.

That clinical and public health grounding — the daily reality of a government hospital, a district health system, and the populations they serve — has informed everything I have written and advised on since.

Thirty years across pharma and vaccines

I left MOH in 1990 to complete an MSc in Occupational Medicine at the National University of Singapore, and joined the pharmaceutical industry with Servier in 1992. Over eight years I built the clinical research function from scratch across Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and Brunei, working to Good Clinical Practice standards at a point when GCP was new to the region. I was one of the authors of Malaysia’s first and second GCP guidelines and helped roll out GCP training nationally. I was part of the Malaysian National Research Committee headed by the Director-General of Health.

I joined Sanofi in 2000 and stayed for seventeen years, moving through successive regional expansions. As Medical Director for Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei, I built a fully functional medical affairs department and organised the first Brunei GCP workshop and ethics committee workshop in 2007, which produced the first Brunei GCP Guidelines. I then moved to Senior Director, Medical and Regulatory Affairs for India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, responsible for more than 70 staff. During this period I initiated one of India’s largest clinical trial registries, SITE — Screening India’s Twin Epidemic of hypertension and diabetes — now published in Scientific Reports and peer-reviewed journals. I served as the first Chairman of Sanofi India’s Medical, Marketing, Regulatory and Business Review Committee from its inception in 2009.

From 2011 I was Senior Director, Medical Affairs for South Korea, with more than 60 staff across clinical operations, pharmacovigilance, medical communications, KOL development, training, publications, and quality. I led the integration of Genzyme into Sanofi medical affairs, and was the first country to integrate shared pharmacovigilance services across Sanofi’s pharma, pasteur, and Genzyme divisions. From 2014 I moved to Senior Director, Dengue Medical Affairs for Asia-Pacific, supporting early registration of the dengue vaccine across the region and its successful launch in the Philippines. My final Sanofi role was Head of Medical Affairs ASEAN, responsible for ten countries and 52 reportees, and key project lead for MSL recruitment across ASEAN, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

I subsequently returned to Korea as Country Medical Lead for Celgene, and then to Taiwan as Country Medical Lead for Bristol Myers Squibb, in both cases leading teams focused on haematology, oncology, and immunology. At Novavax I was the first APAC hire, built the regional medical affairs function from scratch, and rose to Vice President, Head of Medical Affairs Asia-Pacific. I contributed to peer-reviewed publications on NVX-CoV2373 effectiveness data in Vaccine and the Journal of Infection, and represented Novavax on its Global Medical Affairs Leadership Team.

Independent, 2021 onward

I founded MS Pharma and Medical Affairs Sdn Bhd twice — once from 2017 to 2019, once from 2021 to 2022 — offering consultancy across medical affairs, MSL functions, clinical trials, and telehealth-related ventures. I currently work as a freelance Medical Affairs and Clinical Trial Consultant, and sit on advisory boards for BG Pharmaceutical (New York) and Klinsel (Kuala Lumpur). I was admitted to the Academy of Medicine of Malaysia in 2015.

Vads Corner

I established Vads Corner on 12 October 1995 — one of the earliest personal medical websites anywhere — because I saw a gap in what was publicly available on emerging diseases and thought I was in a position to help close it. The site has been self-funded and institutionally independent since the first day: no sponsor, no institution, domain and hosting paid for out of my own pocket for thirty years.

At a point when the WHO and most health ministries had no usable public web presence, Vads Corner was carrying records on Nipah virus, Enterovirus EV71, Chikungunya, SARS, Influenza A(H5N1), West Nile Fever, and the environmental health impact of Indonesia’s peat and forest fires — in several cases the first consolidated online resource anywhere on those diseases. From March 1997, I wrote a monthly Cybermed column for the Malaysian Medical Association Newsletter; the August 1997 column addressed telemedicine, more than two decades before the concept entered mainstream practice.

Kerbside Consult

Kerbside Consult is the current writing output of the site — long-form health policy commentary, independently sourced, written by a physician who has worked on both sides of the systems he writes about. It covers medical inflation, insurance design, health regulation, climate and health, emerging disease, and the gap between policy as announced and policy as delivered. Every factual claim is hyperlinked to its primary source. Corrections are made in public.

Publications and research identity

My published work spans clinical trial registries, vaccines effectiveness data, occupational medicine, and public health. The full record is indexed in three places:

• ORCID — 0009-0007-6843-4373
• Google Scholar profile
• NCBI My Bibliography

Honours and recognition

• Distinguished Civil Service Award — Gold, Negeri Sembilan Health Services, 1988
• Society of Occupational Medicine Book Prize (2nd Placing)
• ASEAN Fellowship (Scholarship)
• Admitted, Academy of Medicine of Malaysia, 13 August 2015

Write to me at cyberdoc@vadscorner.com  ·  Last updated September 2026.