“Only a movement will get us to a better future.”: Dr. Reshma Ramachandran accepts the 2025 Bernard Lown Award
Dr. Reshma Ramachandran received the 2025 Bernard Lown Award for Social Responsibility on June 5, for her exceptional work promoting equitable access to medicines, mobilizing physicians nationwide to challenge pharmaceutical industry influence, and advancing legislative reforms that prioritize the public’s health over corporate profit. (press release)
Dr. Ramachandran is the chair of the FDA Task Force for Doctors for America. She is also an assistant professor, board-certified family physician, and co-founder and co-director of the Yale Collaboration for Regulatory Rigor, Integrity, and Transparency. Inspired by the inequitable access of medications during her time with the Medical Research Council in Cape Town, South Africa, Dr. Ramachandran dedicated her career to advocating for improved pharmaceutical policy. Her work has led her to author numerous op-eds and testify before the U.S. Congress multiple times, ultimately leading to reforms within the FDA that have improved drug development and funding.
Watch her acceptance of the Bernard Lown Award and read excerpts from her speech below.
The remarks of Dr. Reshma Ramachandran
The following are excerpts from Dr. Reshma Ramachandran’s remarks at the Bernard Lown Award ceremony June 5, 2025.
I want to say thank you to my patients, who have since the start of my medical training have taught me so much, and have compelled me to do the work that I do. Three, in particular, have stayed with me, having shaped my experience as a clinician, researcher, and advocate.
In 2009, shortly after I started medical school, I met my first patient, Alicia, a 23-year-old woman who had been hospitalized because she couldn’t breathe. She had been diagnosed with asthma since she was a child. But when I met her, she did not have health insurance and could not afford to pay for an inhaler out-of-pocket. She had come in and out of the emergency room and hospital multiple times when her asthma acutely worsened, and she could no longer breathe. Each of these visits resulted in another bill that she often could not afford to pay. Medications prescribed at the end of each stay were left at the pharmacy counter because she needed the money for the next month’s rent or food.
In 2010 after the Affordable Care Act passed, she was able to get health insurance. However, she soon realized that even with insurance, she could not afford to pay for them. I saw her once again in the hospital. Together, we filled out an extensive list of forms and faxed them over to various drug companies that sold the inhalers she needed. But she was denied again and again, leaving her without access to this life-saving treatment and continuing to come to the emergency room for her all too frequent asthma flares.
“I became increasingly frustrated—wasn’t the Affordable Care Act supposed to solve this problem? Unfortunately, not. Health insurance access did not mean health care access, including for life–saving asthma medications – even those that had been on the market for decades.”
Dr. Reshma Ramachandran, BLASR acceptance remarks, 2025
A few years later in residency, I was taking care of Mr. Brown, an elderly Black gentleman who had been hospitalized for falls. After extensive testing, we found that his prostate cancer had relapsed and spread to his bones, contributing to these falls. When his oncologist told him that he needed to immediately start taking enzalutamide – a treatment for prostate cancer, he became quiet and only replied that he would think about it. He had taken it before and the cost had made him nearly destitute. Even with his Medicare coverage, he had paid over $400 per month in out-of-pocket costs. He told me that this time, he might need to ask son if he could borrow money to afford it, but was ashamed to do so.
Enzalutamide had been discovered and developed just a few miles away at UCLA with the support of funding from the National Institutes of Health and Department of Defense before the university licensed the drug exclusively to Pfizer and Astellas. After FDA approval, this no-strings attached deal allowed the companies to sell the drug at almost $200,000 for a single treatment course—a price that failed to take into consideration the significant amount of taxpayer funding including from Mr. Brown that led to its discovery and development.
Patients, just like Mr. Brown, who had been suffering from prostrate cancer and facing difficulty affording this drug had petitioned the U.S. government to intervene and provide a more affordable option. However, the petitions, including the most recent as of 2024, had all been rejected. Mr. Brown ultimately forwent this treatment. After a subsequent hospitalization for a traumatic fall, he was ultimately moved to hospice and passed.
During fellowship, I met Mr. Jones and his family. After a series of visits with me and other specialists, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. At a subsequent visit, his family came into the exam room with a set of printed papers. They had received an email alerting them that aducanumab or Aduhelm as marketed by Biogen had been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treatment of Alzheimer’s. After answering a series of questions online linked through the email, they were recommended to come speak to their doctor—me—about getting Mr. Jones on this newly approved drug.
Like many others, I had been following this approval closely. Not only did FDA officials as well as independent experts note its lack of meaningful clinical benefit, but also its dangerous side effects of brain bleeding, brain swelling, and death. Despite this, FDA proceeded forward with approving this drug.
I had one of most difficult visits I’ve ever had with a patient and their family. They came in hopeful that their loved one could get access to this new drug, painted by Biogen and FDA as a cure. Painstakingly, I walked through what I knew about aducanumab and the concerns that I had–that if I recommended this drug to Mr. Jones, not only would his memory loss not improve or slow down, but that I would be causing him harm.
“It became clear to me that affordable access was not mutually exclusive from what our patients have access to. And institutions like FDA, which sets the bar for what is safe and effective to be made available for patients, have a critical role and responsibility to shaping meaningful access for our patients.”
Dr. Reshma Ramachandran, BLASR acceptance remarks, 2025
These three different patient experiences throughout my career have not just been one-offs, but have been repeated again and again in the lives of others. For me, these patients are a reminder that our healthcare system has and remains broken. It is these all-too-common experiences that have led to the pervasive mistrust in our public health institutions. And it is a reminder that there is common ground between me, us, our patients, and the current parallel movement that is voicing their doubts in our public health institutions and pushing for seismic changes.
In fact, those responsible for this mistrust have not changed and have only been emboldened by current policies. The erosion of public health agencies like the NIH, FDA, CDC, among others has only made us more reliant on private actors, who see the current landscape as an opportunity to extract more and offer even less to our patients.
And increasingly, we are turning a blind eye to this encroachment in continuing to defend a status quo that has failed to work for our patients, instead of offering a new vision.
But it is not too late to fight back and to do so as Dr. Lown would have. He would have recognized that there has been a movement that has brought us to the current challenges we are facing–and that only a movement will get us to the other side and to a better future.
He would have recognized that our strategy to date in addressing health challenges of tinkering at the margins to assuage every other stakeholder and putting patients as an afterthought has not and will not work. He would have mobilized clinicians and the public to not only protect the missions of public health institutions, but to also transform them.
“This is my hope and my dream – that we all can follow in the footsteps of my father and Dr. Lown to not only fight right now, but to also build without limits to our imagination, a public health system truly centered around our patients.”
Dr. Reshma Ramachandran, BLASR acceptance remarks, 2025