Right medicine, right person: Jacintha Sivarajah on science with purpose

“All medicines have side effects, but it’s just about trying to minimize the impact through providing the information patients and clinicians need or finding other ways to mitigate that impact.” — Jacintha Sivarajah 

With over 15 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry, Jacintha now leads safety oversight for developing medicines. “My role is not only to ensure a proactive safety strategy but also, together with my Global Patient Safety colleagues, to provide robust safety surveillance for all patients enrolled across the whole program.” 

She also sees safety science as a way of maintaining the crucial balance between risk and benefit. “What I do is help to ensure that whatever we do—whether it’s in our clinical trial programs or looking after the safety reporting when people report side effects—we assess that against the benefits and risks of treatments,” she says. “We aim to ensure that the benefit–risk balance remains in favor of the patients taking them.” 

That balance requires vigilance and evolving tools. “Signal detection is a really important part of what we do in safety,” she explains. “You’re looking to see whether there are patterns emerging in side effects and whether that is associated with our medicine or not.” For Jacintha, the science of safety is about putting patients first. 

“Ultimately, we all work to focus on the well-being of patients,” she says. “That’s what drives us all.”