Executive Director
Ananda Plate is Executive Director of Patvocates. She leads on industry services and research. Her main area of work in Patvocates is to enable effective and meaningful patient engagement for pharmaceutical companies and other actors within the healthcare industry. She also leads on any initiatives related to the generation of patient evidence for the purpose of informing decision-making process of relevant stakeholders in healthcare, such as, but not limited to, patient advocacy organisations, regulators, HTA bodies, pharmaceutical companies and clinicians.
Ananda holds a law degree from the University of Barcelona and a master’s degree in Health Policy, Planning and Financing from the London School of Economics and Political Science and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Ananda also completed the EUPATI training course for patient advocates. Her main field of interest is cross border healthcare within the European Union, health data protection, patient involvement in R&D and evidence based patient advocacy.
Ananda became involved in patient advocacy after being diagnosed with cancer in 2006. Since then, she has been deeply involved in the cancer patient community.
Before joining Patvocates, Ananda was the CEO of Myeloma Patients Europe (MPE), leading the Pan-European patient organisation for myeloma and AL-Amyloidosis patients for over ten years. After leaving her CEO position, she was elected board member of MPE and continues as co-chair of the MPE Community Advisory Board. She is also co-founder of the Workgroup of European Cancer Patient Advocacy Networks (WECAN) where she acted as chair in 2019-2020.
Among other past advocacy roles are the representation of MPE at the Patients’ and Consumers’ Working Party of the European Medicines Agency, a member of the ESMO Patient Advocacy Working Group and EHA Patient Advocacy Workgroup, the European Cancer Organisations Patient Advisory Committee, as well as ePAG on the European Reference Network EuroBloodNet. She was also member of the Clinical Ethics Committee of a hospital near Barcelona for several years and is currently a member of the Ethics Committee at Chamber of Physicians Bavaria, Germany.
Publications
Patient Preferences for Multiple Myeloma Treatments: A Multinational Qualitative Study.
Janssens R, Lang T, Vallejo A, Galinsky J, Plate A, Morgan K, Cabezudo E, Silvennoinen R, Coriu D, Badelita S, Irimia R, Anttonen M, Manninen RL, Schoefs E, Vandebroek M, Vanhellemont A, Delforge M, Stevens H, Simoens S, Huys I.
in: Front Med (Lausanne). 2021 Jul 6;8:686165. doi: 10.3389/fmed.2021.686165, PMID: 34295912
Including the patient voice in the development and implementation of patient-reported outcomes in cancer clinical trials.
Addario B, Geissler J, Horn MK, Krebs LU, Maskens D, Oliver K, Plate A, Schwartz E, Willmarth N.
in: Health Expect. 2020 Feb;23(1):41-51. doi: 10.1111/hex.12997. PMID: 31722131
Living with the burden of relapse in multiple myeloma from the patient and physician perspective.
Hulin C, Hansen T, Heron L, Pughe R, Streetly M, Plate A, Perkins S, Morgan K, Tinel A, Rodrigues F, Ramasamy K. Leuk Res. 2017 Aug;59:75-84. doi: 10.1016/j.leukres.2017.05.019. PMID: 28582636