Dr Krisantha Weerasuriya is a medically qualified public health clinical pharmacologist from Sri Lanka and a swashbuckler for Essential Medicines with extensive experience in national, regional and international organisations and projects. He has postgraduate qualifications in Internal Medicine from Sri Lanka and the UK and is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. His Clinical Pharmacology training is through a PhD from St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College, University of London in the UK - trained in high income but educated on the subject in low income. Dr Weerasuriya was the Professor of Pharmacology at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo from 1994 to 2003. He was made Professor Emeritus in November 2019 by the University of Colombo acknowledging his contribution for the University as well as the United Nations (WHO).
He has led projects on Essential Medicines (Selection, Use and Supply), Standard Treatment Guidelines, medicines regulations, pharmacovigilance, and medicines for Neglected Diseases. He currently works on medicines legislation and regulation and prices with a focus on generics and affordability. Dr Krisantha is a member of international advisory groups on Health Technology Evaluation with experience in WHO (15 years) and other multilateral organisations, civil society groups and industry, after his previous career as an academic and medicines regulator in Sri Lanka. His vast experiences contribute to his high-level expertise in Global Health issues, Universal Health Care, analysis, prioritisation and implementation in healthcare systems.
Upon his retirement from WHO in 2014 he was appointed CEO of the newly formed National Medicines Regulatory Authority in Sri Lanka for a short while. In 2016 he became a Medical Advisor at the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) in Geneva (Switzerland) until end 2018. He is currently an independent healthcare consultant with WHO and the Global Fund and has recently done assignments in Pakistan, Timor Leste, Indonesia. Dr Krisantha works extend to other parts of the world with his position of an academic Visiting Expert to the Duke-NUS Centre of Regulatory Excellence (CoRE) in Singapore. In addition, he was also part of the International Advisory Board for the Political Economy of Substandard and Falsified Medicines in Middle-Income Countries funded by Wellcome Trust (UK) and Erasmus University in the Netherlands. He is a RNYT (Retired Not Yet Tired)!