The World Health Summit will be held on October 15-17, 2017, in Berlin under the patronage of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. Key topics this year are health policy in the G7/G20, new vaccine research and development, digitalization and big data, health security, urban health, and Africa and the United Nations' sustainability goals. This year’s speakers include seven government ministers from six countries, two Nobel laureates, and CEOs of businesses and NGOs – including Werner Baumann, Chairman of the Board of Management of Bayer AG.

The Bayer foundations have been supporting the World Heath Summit since 2014 with financial sponsorship in the form of participant stipends in the Young Physician Leaders (YPL) Program and with subject-matter expertise in dialog events. YPL alumnus Dr. Kalana Maduwage’s project is a particularly impressive success story. The physician, scientist, social entrepreneur and snake expert from Sri Lanka took part in the summit last year as a Bayer stipend recipient and garnered enthusiasm with a unique innovation. In his home country alone, around 80,000 farmers are bitten by snakes in their fields every year. The doctors there face a real dilemma: there is never enough antivenom available to treat all of the patients, but anyone receiving treatment too late has little chance of a successful recovery. Maduwage recognized this dilemma from his own work as a physician and is currently working on developing a fast enzyme-based test to determine the actual concentration of snake venom in a patient's blood. In the future, doctors will be able to administer the limited medication in a targeted way and save many patients.

The Bayer Cares Foundation has nominated the project for the 2017 Aspirin Social Innovation Award and will present it, along with other groundbreaking ideas, as part of “The Beauty of Impact” panel at the World Health Summit 2017. The Bayer foundations' lineup will include the social entrepreneur and founder of Discovering Hands, Dr. Frank Hoffmann, who is training blind women to perform breast examinations, as well as Martin Aufmuth, the founder of OneDollarGlasses, a charitable company that produces spectacles for one dollar, with the goal of enabling everyone all over the world to purchase spectacles when needed.

Find more information at: www.bayer-foundations.com