A Supply-Chain Woman Of Iran

By Louis Garguilo, Chief Editor, Outsourced Pharma

Arezou Mehrabi has a spellbinding supply-chain case study to tell. It transpired, of all places, in Iran. It includes:

• challenges in outsourcing pharmaceuticals
• working within a top-ten pharma (Sanofi, to be exact)
• decision-making for critical materials supply 
• partnering with an essential CMO (Dr. Abidi Pharmaceuticals – the first and oldest Iranian pharmaceutical company in the private sector)
• geopolitical barriers/challenges (e.g., U.S. on Iran)

An additional factor:

• Our protagonist is a woman who took leadership among a nearly all-male workplace and environment.  

We’ll start there.

Visa Vistas

Mehrabi is a native-born Iranian. She has held various positions within the pharma industry. (She currently lives in Vancouver, BC.)

While getting her Pharm-D at Iran’s Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences – she also  has an MBA – for her thesis she developed a special formulation related to the suspension for Cimetidine.

She cut her teeth in the industry working in research and development in Iran.

“When you work in R&D,” she says, “you have the opportunity to learn about all the departments in a pharma – lab needs, QA/QC, the different scale ups, and on-time supply of APIs, raw materials and packaging materials – all the most important parts of production.”

From Iran, she moved to Dubai for the next 15 years. There she carved out a career specifically in the commercial end of the drug industry. In 2018, upon her return to Iran, she was hired at Sanofi, based on that commercial supply-chain experience.

Her responsibilities started with overseeing the "knowhow transfer" of three SKUs to the Iranian CMO, Abidi. That eventually reached twenty, all from Sanofi’s global product list.

Mehrabi became the focal point for the Sanofi team based in France.

She also had her own team, and “among other things, we were actively managing and assessing risk for GMP production, and production-line expansion.”

The APIs were imported to Iran directly from Sanofi. The CMO was responsible for bringing in the raw materials and packaging materials, working with Sanofi-approved suppliers around the world.

Considering the economic sanctions the U.S. had put on Iran, this was no easy task, Mehrabi recalls.

“I was supervising to ensure the raw material and packaging orders were being placed accurately, and the materials were acceptable from a quality perspective.”

Abidi would produce the final drug product, but “we needed to approve every single batch before it was released,” she says. "We had a plan in place to go to 30 SKU. However, trade sanctions curtailed those plans.”

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. To understand the supply-chain event she ended up facing, we would be well served to continue our focus on Mehrabi herself.

Off To Dubai

In 1999, Mehrabi applied for migration from Iran to work in Canada. At that time, there was an acute shortage of pharmacists in that country.

Her application was approved – although it took two years – but a difficultly in attaining visitor visas for other family members had her change plans

“I couldn't just leave my family while working so far away overseas,” she says. “My son was school age."

A close friend suggested they work in Dubai. “It’s only a few hours from Tehran,” she recalls her saying.  

“I said are you crazy? It's just a desert. But of course it turned out to be an amazing place,” a singularly cosmopolitan city in that part of the world.

Their visa applications were accepted in about a week. Working in Dubai, Mehrabi became involved "in the commercial side of our global drug business.” That experience helped her eventual return to Iran, and is the setting for the supply-chain narrative we’ll dive into in part two.

End With A Joke

We’ll wrap up our prelude with some perspective on how Mehrabi navagated as an emerging leader in a male-dominated workplace, industry, country, and indeed entire region of the globe.

As I note above, she was a woman put in charge of a complicated large-scale manufacturing operation in Iran, and providing evaluations on production and operations – to the men there.

What was that like?

“Let me answer you by recalling a joke,” she says.

“In high-level meetings, I was the only woman; that actually became natural. It was not a problem for me after a while, even though often I was the one during the meetings making the important decisions.

“One time we had a dinner gathering with our partner and distributors. There were about 10 people from Sanofi France and our team in Iran, and GMs and CFOs of the other companies as well, as well as those responsible for trade and external manufacturing.

“The GM of one of our partners wanted to tell a joke, but he said it was not right to say it in front of ladies. ‘I cannot say it because you are here, Arezou,’ he said.

“A few seconds later he turned to me and said, “No, you are a man. The way you are working, the way that you know how to handle challenges, you are a man. Okay? I will tell the joke because you want to laugh, too.”

Mehrabi says that scene sticks in her memory as representative and encapsulating of her experiences.

Perhaps it could have been worse. She was effectively able to shrug these moments off. She insists they had no impact on her ability to lead.

Nonetheless, Mehrabi and I both wonder how far our industry has come across the globe. Do these scenes transpire less frequently? Will they ever end?

She tells me most of the workers in the pharma industry in Iran are still “government related.” Companies are “nearly 80% government, 20% private industry.”

“And in government, you cannot find general managers who are women; in the private sector, perhaps two are GMs,” she says about Iran specifically.

Yet, within this milieu Mehrabi took control over a complicated supply chain where production of Sanofi’s critical medicines were grinding to a halt, including Plavix, Taxotere, and Depakine.

And now we know the woman better, let’s learn from that experience next.