Jaykumar Menon is working to save the lives of millions of people, including those threatened by Ebola in Africa. The diseases that afflict the developing world don't offer the revenue potential of rich country diseases and therefore lack investment dollars. Jay is leading an effort to apply crowdsourcing and open source concepts to find treatments for diseases that plague the Global South.

The Open Source Pharma project, by gathering hundreds or even thousands of researchers to work on open source drug development projects, can accelerate drug development and reduce the costs.

On Thursday, September 4, 2014 at 2:00 Eastern, Jay will join me for a live discussion about his inspiring work. Tune in here then to watch the interview live.

You can download an audio podcast here or subscribe via iTunes.

Jay's bio:

Jaykumar Menon is an international human rights lawyer, scholar, and social entrepreneur. Currently a Professor of Practice at the McGill University Institute for International Development, he focuses his research, teaching, and practice on open innovation approaches (e.g. crowdsourcing, innovation prizes, and open IP) to realizing human rights, especially next generation economic rights (e.g the rights to food, water, and health). He has pioneered a number of concepts recently backed by the international community (Gates, Rockefeller, Soros, Tata foundations; DFID; AusAid; CIDA; World Bank; with launches by the heads of state of the UK, Australia, and Canada) with a total funding of $110+M, aimed at making a large dent in severe problems affecting over a billion poor people. Previously he led the international development and education programs at the X PRIZE Foundation, an radical innovation group funded by the founders of Google and Facebook that awards $10+ million incentive prizes to teams that achieve targeted “radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.” He founded X PRIZE’s operations in India and has worked on innovation and development with WFP, IIT-Delhi, the UN Secretary-General’s Office, the Prime Minister’s Office of the Government of India, and other groups. As a human rights lawyer at the New York City-based Center for Constitutional Rights, working alongside activists and community groups, he won a string of victories in high profile cases. He represented the student leaders of Tiananmen Square against the ex-Premier of China, helped win a $4 billion judgment on behalf of victims of the Bosnian genocide against Radovan Karadzic, helped represent the family of Nigerian environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa in a landmark corporations and human rights suit against Royal Dutch Shell ($15M settlement), freed a man from death row in Indiana, and as the fifteenth lawyer to take up the case, hunted through the prisons of New York for the real killer and helped exonerate a man named David Wong who has served over a decade of a life sentence for murder. As a scholar, he has written articles in top peer-reviewed international human rights law reference journals and books, including those published by the Oxford University Press. As an entrepreneur, he has co-founded a venture-funded Internet company with current seven-figure revenues. He is a published creative writer, having served as an editor of a book published by McSweeney’s, and written a short story in an anthology that collectively won the American Book Award. He has also worked at McKinsey. He holds a JD and a Master of International Affairs from Columbia and completed a BA and one year of medical school at Brown. He hopes to creatively effect large-scale and just social change.

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